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BattleBots & ESPN Strike TV Deal
NMajik writes "Although BattleBots has been largely removed from the public eye since episodes stopped airing years ago, a new deal has recently been struck with ESPN to return combat robots to the living room. Episodes will be broadcast as a series on ESPNU and ESPN2 after filmed at the competition in June 2008. This is the first notable progress towards televised combat robotics in years."
we're way past stirke three with the editors inability to edit
Its mildly cool and all, but I'm sorry, remote controlled vehicles are not robots. They're kind of the complete opposite of robots.
This space available.
I missed that show. My father and I did not connect on a lot of things, but robots thrashing the crap out of each other was something we could both share....
That and Betelgeuse from the Howard Stern show.
My friends and I always thought that BattleBots on Comedy Central was a bad idea.
:-)
The humor was funny, but the sportscasting was awful. Weird stats, rarly any good discussion over what happened or any more details. The after-fight interviews were pretty much just, "How did you feel about winning?". And the crazy stats and numbers rarely had any relation to the judges scores, which were glossed over and never explained.
We always wished ESPN would have shown it.. THEY at least know how to host a sporting event. Hopefully they will treat Battle Bots just like any other sport this time around, explaining judge decisions, giving people a better idea of why someone wins, focusing on the exciting parts more than long, long clips about someones garage.
Here's to hoping we get lucky and ESPN doesn't screw it up this time around.
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Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Dunno if any of you over the other side of the pond ever got this show, it stopped in 2003, and was presented by Craig Charles (oh he of Red Dwarf fame).
Was an awesome program, with a whole load of different teams, ranging from a 13 year old girl with her Dad to a major university grad team and a Army engineers team.
Was pretty decent in it's day. Maybe they should bring this back.
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
Until some real new idea comes out. On the UK 'Robot Wars' it was turning into a battle of the flippers v the axes, until innovations like HypnoDisc and Gemini appeared. HypnoDisc had a heavy horizontal spinning disk with blades, and a very low CoG. It span up until it had masses of angular momentum, and then all the other robots just bounced off it with massive gashes. Version 1 was liable to being flipped, but in the next series they added a self-righting mechanism. Gemini was a 'clusterbot': the robot split into two independent parts, each with a flipper. Combined they were below the weight limit so it was all legal. Other bots found themselves facing two small light flippers, and so couldn't use the usual tactic of pointing their dangerous end at the opponent.
For both competitions, BattleBots would like to open the door to a new "anything goes," experimental class. There are NO rules and NO weights for this class. So the answer is yes, as long as you enter into the experimental class, otherwise check the rules.
Next up on ESPN: Davion vs Steiner, live from Solaris VII!
(maybe we should get these guys involved to speed up the process).
Since I'm happily employed and unlikely to end up as an advisor for the show, I'll throw in a few words of advice for ESPN.
1. Do something about the wedge/flipper bots. There are plenty of methods to deal with them that don't involve a simple ban on the design type. But trust me when I say that BattleBots was being done in by what appeared to be a never ending supply of squat cheese wedges.
Why spend time engineering a novel robot when you could stick a motor and a hydraulic arm into a wedge and have a good chance at winning?
2. Give them a real amount of time to fight. Comedy Central tried to cram the whole tournament into something that was far to short. Let the damned things fight.
2.1: Let the damned things fight. The course doesn't need to be 'extreme' and deadly. Sure, put in a few obstacles but don't turn the course into a third opponent. Nothing like watching a good battle only to see one opponent DQ'd after some goofy piece of scenery flips over for no reason.
Imagine watching a UFC match. The opponents have separated after an amazing show on the mat. They are circling one another, knowing that if they show the other any opening that it will be taken advantage of. This is a fight to go down in history books gentlemen. I haven't seen one like this since... Opps, there goes the trap door. Bob Tartarsky wins.
3. It doesn't need to be the WWF/WWE to be entertaining. No need for over the top announcers that act like 8 yr olds on meth. Keep the commentary on topic and interesting, not loud and idiotic.
4. This one follows number 3. We can get our bikini babes on the internet, you are not SPIKE tv.
5. Give a reasonable stipend to the robots that compete. These things are expensive, but are expected to enter into a fight where their entire investment could be flushed away. The designer of the robot shouldn't have to be a wiz at getting sponsorship. Don't ban sponsorship, but give the anti-social geeks a chance.
6. Consider price caps in addition to weight restrictions. I'd be interested in seeing the $10k robots fight the $10k robots.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
This guy is going to kick ass in the experimental class.
The rules are here, if you don't mind pdfs.
Weapon types that aren't allowed in the normal class include electricity and electromagnetic weapons (no EMP or Tesla coils), weapons that require significant cleanup (sand, oil, liquids, ball bearings), weapons intended to obscure vision (smoke, strobe lights), thermal weapons (no explosives or cutting torches, although you can use explosives to, say, drive a piston), mechanism fouling weapons (nets, tarps, caltrops), and no mutually destructive mechanisms.
There are also restricted weapons. Projectiles are allowed, but must be on a tether of no more than 8' in length. Covering weapons are allowed, but must be rigid and controllable. Airbags are allowed, but must conform to the rules for pneumatics, and can't be used as mechanism fouling weapons when deflated. Flywheels need to be installed properly, so that they don't fly off or apart while spinning. Large springs (20 lbs of force to extend or compress) need to be armed by the bot, not manually, and need to be able to be released manually without causing damage to the person doing the releasing.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
I think more important than what's allowed on the robots is what kind of surface will they be playing on. When they're played on very smooth, very flat surfaces, it becomes all about wedges and flippers. Every robot has a skirt with less than 1cm clearance on all sides, and the winners are the ones that can slip under that skirt.
If they changed it so that the games were played on uneven, non smooth surfaces, maybe even some dirt/grass, water, etc. you'd have to have exposed wheels / tracks. Wedges / flippers would no longer have a massive advantage.
Survival of the fittest in robot fighting competitions is, like all other survival of the fittest contests, based on the environment. If the environment is varied enough that one niche player can't dominate everything, you'll get much more interesting fights, and much more variety in design.
Part of the reason for things being banned is a simple matter of safety. I've competed at several robot combat events with a middleweight, and even with the extremely strict safety rules and the high tech arenas, some of them are freaking dangerous. I've been within a few feet of an arena breach at one point, where some of the heavier robots hit a wall hard enough to come up over the safety stop and almost go through the bulletproof Lexan arena wall (fortunately neither robot managed to come clear out of the arena, but they knocked a wall section out and very nearly did). There have also been incidents of robots with cutting weapons putting holes clear through the wall (and at least one incident I know of where a robot put a hole in a 1/2" thick steel plate that was part of the arena safety system). The safety crew at the events takes these things very seriously - the fight IMMEDIATELY stops if there's any threat of the arena being breached, and the robots are disabled until the situation can be evaluated, but that's with the limited scope of the current rules - many of the things people would love to see in the robots would be damn near impossible to do safely around an audience.
Even if there isn't an audience, there's still the crews to think about. People have to work around the robots to repair them (many of the rules involve safeguarding the robot when it's around people), and to load them into and out of the arena. Also, some of these robots get torn up pretty badly, hence rules relating to making sure the robots aren't hazardous to clean up after they've gotten heavily damaged.