BattleBots: High Civilization and Ancient Savagery Expressing The Human Experience

Promotional image from Discovery Channel’s BattleBots

The city stretches out into the night. dark shadows inset with myriad lights extending as far as can be seen. In one of the larger buildings, a crowd is gathered around an arena. The lighting within is largely dark and blue, to better serve as a background for the cameras gathering footage to be broadcast the fights to those who can’t attend in person. The arena itself is a half-cube, about 50 feet to a side, with clear, impact-resistant walls and a plate-steel floor.

A large, dark man wearing a large, dark suit with a large, dark beard steps into the middle of the arena. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he bellows, “are you ready?” The crowd, already abuzz, roars louder. The man shouts a well-practiced declaration: “It’s Robot Fightin’ Time!”

From the pits behind the arena space emerge two machines. One is called Icewave, named not after ice but after I.C.E., the deliberately retro internal combustion engine that drives its weapon, a massive steel bar that spins out from its center, its tips reaching out beyond the boxy, wheeled body carrying it. The other, a grappler, is called Razorback. It sports two arms with wheels, which it can rotate from one end to either flip around or gain height. On its front it sports a triangular wedge of steel, built to deflect horizontal spinners such as Icewave.

The two robots move to their starting positions at opposite ends of the arena. There, they run through systems checks. Razorback adjusts its wedge, then rears up onto its back wheels, rolling forward, then back, looking eager to fight. Icewave sits still, spending its warm-up time bringing its spinning bar up to a roaring blur as the crowd cheers. Once both machines are confirmed operable and ready, a light at the top of the arena flashes RED-RED-RED-GREEN, and the battle begins.

The two robots rush at each other. Icewave’s bar catches Razorback’s wedge, and both bots are deflected off course. Razorback continues an aggressive strategy, driving its wedge into Icewave’s weapon over and over. Each time the two make contact, a flash of sparks fly. Icewave retreats to a corner. It makes a sound like the howl of a helicopter as its weapon spins up to full speed, the tip of its 47-pound steel bar exceeding 200 miles per hour. It catches Razorback in the side, throwing the other robot off toward the edge of the arena. Icewave spins up again as Razorback reorients itself and returns Icewave delivers another hit, and then another, the second finally breaking the wedge. The tough plate of metal falls away, revealing the sharp forks Razorback uses to grab and maneuver less dangerous opponents. Its strategy foiled, Razorback attempts to flee, but Icewave gives chase. The spinning bar takes chunks of fork and wheel away in one blow, leaving Razorback hobbled, stuck in a corner of the arena. Icewave backs off, spins its weapon up again, then returns for another blow. This time, it shatters the front of Razorback’s body; one of Razorback’s internal components hangs out of the gash by its wires, a machine’s eerie echo of a slain swordsman’s dangling viscera. Icewave has taken its own damage from the impact, as its bar ceases spinning and smoke pours from its engine housing. But Icewave is only hurt; Razorback is dead and gutted. A human referee, who has been observing the fight from the other side of the arena walls, counts back from ten and declares a knockout. Icewave is victorious.

The scene I just described, though it would fit right into any number of pulp sci-fi works, actually happened. Icewave vs. Razorback was an early match in the 2015 season of BattleBots, a robot combat competition that aired on ABC. Now, to be upfront about things, the term “robot” here might be taken as an exaggeration. Icewave, Razorback, and all their friends are not conscious agents; they are remotely operated by the people who build them. They’re more like drones than droids.

BattleBots actually has been around for a while. *SBNation* ran an article about its history back in 2013, at a time when the sport was all but dead. Essentially. in 1992, Lucasfilm toy designer Mark Thorpe had an idea, or a confluence of a few ideas, to hold a competition between vehicles armed with saws and spikes. He, along with some visual effects artists from ILM and some investors developed Robot Wars. an untelevised competition held in San Francisco. By 1998, Robot Wars had moved to British television, with BBC 2 airing a show based on the Bay Area fights. A year later, in 1999. a rival event was held at Long Beach, CA and broadcast on ZDTV (a Silicon Valley cable channel that would soon be renamed TechTV, and which was the original home of Leo “The Tech Guy” Laporte). This competition was called BattleBots, and it was also, at least initially, the brainchild of Mark Thorpe, who had run into legal trouble with Robot Wars investor Steve Plotniki, of Profile Records, and was looking for a fresh start in robot combat. Thorpe was eventually forced to withdraw his involvement, leaving Trey Roski (son of billionaire L.A. developer Ed Roski, who, in partnership with Philip Anschutz built the Staples Center, where many later BattleBots tournaments were held) to fight off further lawsuits from Plotniki. It was eventually determined that robot combat was a sport not able to be owned by a single entity, and, after some pay-per-view events, BattleBots found a long-term TV home on Comedy Central.

It was a weird fit. Comedy Central seemed to see BattleBots as an even more ridiculous answer to the WWE, and filled space between fights with scripted bits satirizing sports commentary. Still, BattleBots got attention. Future Mythbusters Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage collaborated on Blendo, a robot built under a rapidly-spinning, studded dome which ran into some trouble by sending shrapnel from the other bot flying into the audience (hence why later seasons feature the enclosed “BattleBox” arena). Grant Imahara, an ILM employee who would also go on to star on MythBusters saw success with the hammer-swinging Deadblow. Even comedian and noted gearhead Jay Leno took part; after a few competitors from the first Comedy Central season appeared on The Tonight Show, Leno sponsored Chinkilla, an illegally heavy bot that fought in some exhibition matches for seasons 2 and 3. Comedy Central aired BattleBots for a total of five seasons, until the network was bought by MTV, who wanted them to air, y’know, comedies, not weird cyberpunk sporting events.

Two years after that SBNation article, in 2015, BattleBots returned. Like all mediocre-to-good things, it was rebooted by a major TV network. ABC aired two seasons before the show moved to the Discovery Channel, which will be airing a sixth season starting January 6th. The reboot was less WWE and more MMA; the fights were taken more seriously, and scripted skits were gone. Sportscaster Chris Rose and former UFC fighter Kenny Florian were brought on to host, and did so with a fun-loving but sincere style. The lone element of comic relief came from Emcee Faruq Tauheed’s pun-laced bot introductions. ABC’s first season featured 24 competitors; the first fight was Icewave vs. Razorback.

By the second season, the competitor roster had doubled from 24 to 48. The third season (the first to air on Discovery) featured 55 robots, and expanded to include a full qualifying season ahead of the single-elimination tournament. The upcoming sixth season will feature 63 competitors.

One major element of BattleBots, namely the “Battle” part, has, of course, a history going back further than the ‘90s. Fighting exhibitions are probably as old as human society itself. To this day, the Romans are famous for their tournaments of gladiators. armed combatants who fought in staged battles and duels, almost always getting bloodied and wounded, and sometimes even dying. Moreso than pro wrestling or kickboxing, this is what BattleBots seems the most like. Not just because of the “to-the-death” level of violence (bloodless, this time, but still severely destructive), but because of the variety of approaches. Roman gladiators came in different flavors, sometimes heavily armored crupellarii, sometimes retiarii wielding spears and nets. sometimes helmeted thraeces swinging dual swords. Likewise, there is no single, standard BattleBot. Some bots go all-in on weaponry, while others focus on armor and control measures. Some employ specific, devastating strategies while others take a more general approach. Some bots are utilitarian, while others sport more stylized designs.

BattleBots is not a complete free-for-all. The current design rulebook is eleven pages long. It sets weight limits (250 lbs., unless a builder is not going to set their bot on wheels, in which case they can go up to 500 lbs), motion limits (no part of the bot may move at greater than 238.6 miles per hour, and all moving parts must come to rest if the bot loses signal), and prohibits certain types of weapons. (Snares, liquids, smoke screens, EMP emitters, and firearms are all out. Actually, while a gun might seem like a good pick in most fights, against a typical or even a poor BattleBot, a bullet would likely ricochet off plate metal and into the audience, so that last ban is less about keeping fights winnable and more about heading off half-baked ideas before someone gets hurt.) All bots must have some sort of weapon, a rule that’s been in place since the sport’s early days when La Machine, a greased-up metal wedge on wheels that had no means of damaging other bots but which also didn’t offer anything for opponents to get ahold of nearly won the 1996 Robot Wars tournament without really fighting. Now, some bots, such as the incredibly sturdy Duck, don’t have anything that could tear another bot up. They don’t necessarily need to, in order to win a match.

A BattleBots fight can end in one of two ways: with a knockout or with a judge’s decision. A knockout occurs when a bot is damaged or positioned such that it can no longer perform translational motion. This can mean that it just doesn’t move anymore, as in the case of poor Razorback, or it can mean that it’s so hobbled that it can only move in circles or arcs, or it can even mean that a bot has been flipped or tipped in such a way that it can’t reach the ground with its wheels. If a fight goes for three minutes without either bot getting knocked out, then a panel of three judges score the fight, awarding 5 points based on damage dealt, 3 points based on exhibited aggression, and 3 points based on the level of control maintained over the fight. (Details of how scoring works are provided in another rulebook.) It is thus possible to build for durability and still win. Actually, if your bot is sturdy enough, a high-energy attack could lead to your opponent’s bot breaking itself while trying to hurt you.

The variety of approaches to victory has led to a variety of bot designs. BattleBots is not just a gladiatorial tournament; it’s an engineering expo. Seeing the builds is almost as big a draw as seeing the fights. Probably the most respected builders are the team behind Chomp, captained by Zoe Stephenson. Professionally, Stephenson is a mechanical engineer with a consulting firm, and she has brought that expertise to Chomp, which has actually been the name of 3 very different bots. The first was armed with a mouth-like combination of fixed forks and a crushing spike. The second was armed with a spiked hammer, built to swing automatically when an onboard LIDAR system detected the opponent was in range. This second-gen Chomp remains the only bot to defeat multi-time BattleBots Grand Champion Bite Force. The third Chomp was even more advanced. It was a walker, borne on six pointed legs and topped with a rotating turret carrying a hammer. The turret could autonomously track an opponent, aiming and swinging the hammer without input from the drivers. While Chomp has lost twice as many fights as they’ve won, Stephenson and her team command great respect as builders. They’ve brought the sport closer to actual robotics than any other team.

The most influential design in BattleBots isn’t the one most advanced, or even the one most imitated. It’s the most feared. Tombstone, captained by Ray Billings, won every one of its regular season fights for the first three years of the BattleBots reboot, taking the Grand Championship trophy in the second year. (That trophy, by the way, is a hex nut measuring eight inches to a side, appropriately called the Giant Nut.) Tombstone’s design is simple. It’s a box with a large wheel on each side and a spinning blade set on a strut on the front. It can turn on a dime, and has broken many a bot into pieces. Billings, while a liked and respected veteran of the sport, is not a particularly gracious winner. He leans into a heel persona and is proud to be the one with the bot to beat. Last season, though, Tombstone lost three fights, with only two wins. Over the years, bot design has changed. Hardened, sloped armor wraps most bots nowadays, providing protection against horizontal spinners such as Tombstone. The big winners nowadays are vertical spinners; the last three giant nuts went to bots with short, thick bars spinning upwards from the middle of a forked front. The generic bot design, favored by newcomers and veterans performing redesigns, is the vertical drum spinner, a high-momentum, low-reach weapon popularized by Minotaur, a Brazillian bot who made a big impression in the 2016 season. Both these designs can effectively knock away a horizontal spinner’s blade. Tombstone may not win consistently anymore, but its marks are apparent on every opponent before the fight even starts.

Builders are allowed to adjust designs between fights, swapping out weapons or adding/shifting armor, so long as the new configuration still meets the design standards. Usually, this is done in response to the other bot’s design, the way Razorback added a wedge to defend against Icewave’s spinner. And usually, these changes are uncontroversial. The biggest issue caused by a modification that I can remember is the infamous “bike rack” fight from last season. This was a fight between Hydra and Huge. Hydra is a flipper bot: it has a plate on a hydraulic arm that slides under its opponent, then flips up to toss the opponent into the air. Flipper bots are a reasonably common design; Bronco and SubZero are two other notable examples, but Hydra is arguably the top of its sort at the moment. Huge is a very unique bot. Most designs try to build low to the ground. Huge is built up in the air, borne on two 3-foot-diameter wheels on either end, and with a spinning blade in the middle that can reach the top of most other bots. Against Hydra, Huge had a major design advantage, since its body sat out of the reach of Hydra’s flipper. So Hydra made some changes. Namely, it got a large construct of metal pipe, which came to be called the “bike rack” because it sort of looked like one, welded to its front. With this, it was able to catch Huge’s wheels and keep it at arm’s length. Hydra never used, and, in fact, could have never used, its weapon. It won by judges decision on grounds that it had better maintained control of the fight. Fans argued over whether Hydra had cheated or simply found an unexpected way to win. For Season 6, a rule banning “corralling” for extended periods was added.

Competing in BattleBots is not cheap. Building a proper bot, and enough spare parts to keep it in good working order through the competition costs, on average, in the low five figures. Thus, bots need sponsors. Typically these are parts vendors or other engineering-associated companies, such as Autodesk. This has, so far, been enough to sustain the sport. Last season, two bots challenged the high-cost status quo. Jackpot, captained by plumber Jeff Waters (yes, a plumber named Waters), reportedly cost only $4,000.00 to produce, and it won all three of its regular-season matches. And Rusty, which was built by a one-man, unsponsored team out of scrap metal and builder David Eaton’s parents’ popcorn bowl, won two of its three pre-tournament fights. In the coming season, Eaton has attracted twenty-one sponsors, who have funded an entirely new version of Rusty, built out of stronger parts. Even still, with the renewed commercial success of the sport, there have been calls for BattleBots to fund bot construction more directly. Paul Ventimiglia, the veteran builder of Bite Force, among other bots, has declined to compete in the upcoming season partly due to a lack of progress toward contract improvements that would fund new teams’ bots. At time of writing, I haven’t heard any update regarding this.

There’s a great deal of discussion that could be had about why the gladiatorial spectacle persists in human culture. It seems, at first glance, a sin of sorts, a violation of the Golden Rule. We abhor violence against ourselves, and so we should abhor it against others, generally accepted morality dictates. And yet we feel such glee watching things get destroyed. And it is, perhaps to our credit, mostly things which serve as our gladiators, nowadays. Pitting (in a literal sense) animals against one another is a significantly more underground thing today than it was even a century ago. Boxing, wrestling, and other martial arts contests persist, not without controversy, but those are more shows of endurance than destruction, with maimings and killings regulated away. Those wishing to see ruin wreaked have turned elsewhere: to the demolition derby, to MythBusters, to action movies, to the myriad “Industrial Shredder” and “Hydraulic Press” viral videos, and to BattleBots. Entertainment is less murderous than in times past, but I wouldn’t say it’s less violent.

Personally, I don’t think destruction-as-entertainment exists in spite of our desire for peace and order; I think it exists because of it. Not in the sense that I believe people are hopelessly violent creatures and that civilized society is an artifice holding our true nature back until we find some way to let it burst out. After all, no one’s twisting our arms to make us form a peaceable society; we’re doing so ourselves. We like living at peace if possible, which is why we’ve put so much work into maintaining peace and order. But that’s the thing: it’s work.

Think about your day, your typical, day-to-day day. You wake up, and, if you’ve paid attention to TED Talk generals, you make your bed, restoring some degree of order to your world. If you’ve paid attention to all those doctors Edward Bernays paid off, you eat something for breakfast. You’ve made a mess, so you need to work to restore your kitchen’s order. If you paid attention to a band of animated dinosaurs and sabertooth cats from television, you’ll brush your teeth right away, restoring order to your mouth, which would otherwise be overrun by disorderly nature, in the form of bacteria. And then you’ll follow a similar pattern for the rest of your day. You’ll watch your step, you’ll comb your hair, you’ll signal your turns, you’ll be careful how you handle something fragile. You’ll work and work, in ways small and large, easy and difficult, deliberate and unconscious, voluntary and enforced, to keep the order you so dearly desire from disappearing. You’ll do that all day, every day, for the rest of your life.

Into this ceaseless struggle enters the gladiatorial spectacle. For just brief moments, we relent. We allow the universe’s decay to do its work; nay, we throw in with it. We turn that slow decay into rapid havoc. We take something and ruin it. In this way, we can relax, like a climber getting to walk downhill.

BattleBots is so compelling because it has both creation and destruction. People gather from around the world, using their expertise and ingenuity to produce astounding works of engineering. And then, they smash them to bits. It’s a fusion of high civilization and ancient savagery that serves to express the human experience, or, at least, a good chunk of it. If you’ve never seen it, I’d really recommend checking it out. It’s something special.