400 Battle Bots Fight, Toss Enemies At RoboGames Competition

Andre writes "The 6th annual RoboGames were held in San Francisco last weekend. They welcomed a horde of 400 non-sentient, metallic warriors to do violent battle — against each other, of course. This army of remote-controlled and autonomous combat robots, along with walking humanoids, soccer 'bots, sumo 'bots and even androids that do kung-fu, was put to the test. Among the big winners was Canadian-made 'Ziggy' — one of the combatants in the 340-pound, super-heavyweight division (the biggest division) — who took home a gold medal for the fourth year in a row. The bionic brute proved its might against its final opponent, the 'Juggernaut,' by tossing it around like an empty pop can (and promptly making a mockery of its name) using a pneumatic flipper. Ziggy's newly-improved weapon results in unwanted (but totally cool) free-flying lessons for its opponents. At full power, the flipper can launch an opponent to the arena ceiling."

Comments

Flipbots = imba

[Hubbell]

I remember watching battlebots and the matches were always good unless one of the bots was a flipbot (what ziggy is, and now almost all of them are cause it's an incredibly overpowered design) and feel that in such competitions flipbots should be banned.

*not* 400, it was 63 - I was there

[societyofrobots]

There were only ~63 battlebots there. The other robots were mostly autonomous, and were not involved in combat.