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Interview with Battlebots Champion
Scoop writes "With the fifth season of BattleBots debuting a few days ago on Comedy Central, UGO.com chatted up contestant Jim Smentowski, creator of champion BattleBot, Nightmare. Jim shared his views on the hit show, his experience with Gary Coleman and robotics in general. No word yet on the rumored love-child between Smentowski and BB host, Carmen Electra."
When the robots become autonomous, battling without human intervention, then I'll start showing real interest. That, and lets include some serious offensive weapons. Sure, spinning around like a mad top is ok, but how about projectiles? Flamethrowers? Tazer devices? That's what I'm talking about... And maybe serious, bot-bunching obstacles. Sure you'd have to hide the audiance behind bulletproof/shatterproof glass and make them sign waivers, but hey, it'd all be hella fun.
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Battlebots should really be called Battle-RCs, but who cares. The show is good clean fun and is inspiring the next generation to inch another step closer to creating real robots. Maybe in another 25 years or so, we'll get there. Back to my regular programming...
No word yet on the rumored love-child between Smentowski and BB host, Carmen Electra.
Hmm, I wonder what Dave Navarro would have to say about that.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
"Ok....they're sitting there. It doesn't look like...OH WAIT!!.... No, no, nothings moving. False alarm. Our ratings are plummeting and...(listens into headset...No! I will not do that! (listens some more) Oh, fine. (loudly) My shirt! I believe that my shirt is falling off! Oh no!"
*Prepares for REAL ULTIMATE offtopic moderation ;)*
By the way, have you noticed the privacy statement at Battlebots. Have you noticed that they reserve the right to supply 3rd party companies with your info??
I haven't heard about any BSD based bots yet - have you?.
I would also like to whine about "the lack of jobs where you get paid to fire foam darts at colleagues". </test>
When the robots become autonomous, battling without human intervention, then I'll start showing real interest.
You'd probably be interested in RoboCup Soccer. The goal of this ambitious robotics project is to develop a team of fully autonomous robots that can defeat the human champion team of soccer by the year 2050.
And in this corner! He puts the "evil" in "weevil", he will make you cry, and he is not your father's can of corn....The Human Robot!
Announcer Guy 1: That was quite a match!
Announcer Guy 2: Thats right Guy#1! Lets go to the floor with our large chested eye-candy!
Carmen Elektra: Hi Guys! I'm here with the winner of this match, Middle-aged car shop guy! So tell me, how were you able to pull off this exciting and lucrative win?
Middle-aged Car Shop Guy: Uhhhhhh, I like, ran into the other guy, and the hammer thing hit it. A lot.
Close-up of Carmen's Breasts
Announcer Guy 1: Join us next time for another exciting edition... of Battle Breasts! uhh Bots!
Hmmm... It sounds good, but my first impression is that it wouldn't fly simply because the disparity in engineering between robots and humans. I guess it could work given the right combination of materials and some pretty stellar programming.
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I guess one way to limit the liability is to limit the amount of flammables one unit could carry, thereby limiting the explosive power should something go horribly wrong. The teathering is a good idea too. Maybe a "Limited" series with an audiance and a robot "unlimited series" with remote braodcasting and all the weapons you can mount.
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That (somewhat) exists. It isn't possible to just fight whatever you bring, due to not wanting to off and kill all the spectators with exploding robots, but there are smaller non-televised competitions that are builder/live-audience focused. Most of them are on the east coast, started due to the fact that it costs as much to go to San Fran to compete as it does to build a robot if you don't live in or near California. Anyone in North Carolina, there's one coming up in a week - Details are available at http://www.secr.org
Actually, I figured something like that, but didn't know BB's exact saftey standards. Thanks ^__^
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I seem to recall the Battlebox is made of really thick Lexan sheets. The problem is that the more destructive you let the robots be, the harder it is to even predict what measures you need to take to protect the audience. Say your bot has a flamethrower - what happens if a pulverizer makes the gas tank go boom? Now you have an explosion, fire, and a very heavy hammer flying through the air. For that matter, how do you know a wire hasn't lost some insulation and is just waiting to spark while the judge is standing next to it after the fight? How about gas leaks?
That's another problem. With the current design, it's easy for people working in the Battlebox to know when they could, conceivably, be in danger. If they're in reach of a blade or arm, they might be in harm's way. If they aren't, they're probably safe. But as soon as you talk about ranged weapons, or even super-powerful obstacles, you increase the risk to the people, and the expense required to run the contest.
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I was just thinking, the betips.net site used to use the BeOS filesystem as a spiffy database - read about it at the site - and beos was designed from the word go to work with large multimedia projects, huge video files, that sort of thing. Might BeOS be a good platform for the sort of on-the-fly image recognition software a kick-ass autonomous battlebot would need?
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Hey! RobotWars and Iron Chef! Are you thinking what I'm thinking Pinky?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Anyone know the Smiling Guy's email address?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Oh god. If you think Battlebots is WW(F/E)ified, then run in fear from "Robot Wars: Extreme Gladiators" or whatever the hell it's called on TNN. Last night, a friend of mine said it was on. I said it was pretty weak, he said "So?" and we both watched it anyhow.
Repeatedly I was proven -exactly- how right I was in the first place. Every bot was a really pathetic contestant compared to the ones on Battlebots, and the hosts... My god. The only way I could describe it was as Battlebots without the class. The bots sucked, the fights were -boring- as hell and the only bright spot - surprisingly - was Mick Foley formerly AKA "Mankind" doing the post-fight interviews. He also got to tell the teams who won, which was a nice touch too. As an interviewer, his major problem was screwing up the name of a bot, and still using the facial expressions you'd expect from a wrestler. He did, overall, provide a -much- better interaction with the builders. Less fluff.
I think Battlebots needs to hire Foley, and the rest of "Robot Wars" can just go suck eggs. Even the contestants sucked. One kid looked like Brian Dennehy's "Mini-Me" and the guys who won the show all acted like wanna-be Foleys. Sad. Very sad.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
I wonder what Jim has done to prevent what happened to Nightmare When he met the horizontal spinner Son of Wyachi.......damn that was a hit.
Yeah, or at the San francisco battlebots tournament, when Nightmare got torn into pieces by Warhead.
Champion, my ass. This whole "BattleBots" thing is a sham.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Gary Coleman is a robot?
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
Common, you're making it sound fun! I'd say limit the amount of onboard fuel allowed, first. As fas a projectiles flying through the air and striking the audiance with the greatest of ease, you'd have to perform worst case senarios and otherwise trash an arean before you allow the audiance in.
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That's all. I will still watch the show, but there are many improvements that can still be made. The competition is even worse, ala' Robot Wars (the US version anyway) where the bots are piles of junk, the drivers spend most of the match crashing their bot into the arena walls because of a complete lack of driving skill, and the house bots decide almost every match.
There was an episode of junkyard wars that did this. They took 2 old V6 beaters and converted them into giant battlebots to fight in a 100 yard ring.
:-)
Its was great at the end one tore the hell out of the axel of the other and it went careening out of control at 45mph into a dirt mound.
If battle bots was like that I would watch every day.
Battle bots used to be much better before all the lawsuits. If your curious to see what happend to hmonigize all this then look up all the legal battles over who owned battle bots and you will see what really killed this idea.
"Don't mess with him, he taunts the happy fun ball."
. It would be nice to see Linux based bot beating a Microsoft based one to hell and back.
:(
There would be no clear winner as the MS bot would explode for no reason taking half the arena with it. Much like our exchange server recently did
"Don't mess with him, he taunts the happy fun ball."
Yeah...they actually did that twice as I recall...but there's rather a difference between remote controled demolition derby and machines with sledge hammers, buzz saws, and so on....now if they were attaching concrete saws to v-6's.... *drool*
What is your Slash Rating?
If I remember right they attempted 2, 1 car actually had an attack weapon attached to the roof that had a spinning chain on the top, though the weapon was rather useless. I still say not a bad job for 8 or so hours work.
Now if it was on the scale of battle bots and people had time to develop thier weapons we could see some real carnage.
Only thing is once you get to that size if you loose you bot its 20 grand down the drain as opposed to 3 - 5 grand.
"Don't mess with him, he taunts the happy fun ball."
Thanks for pointing that out - guess it kinda pokes a gaping hole in my "Safety" theory.
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