Faster, Meaner, Deadlier: The Evolution of “BattleBots”

https://spectrum.ieee.org/battlebots-tech-evolution

by pseudolus • 4 years ago

104 58 4 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

Fascinating read. The part about encouraging heterogeneity among robot designs was something I never considered, but makes a ton of sense.

exmadscientist2• 4 years ago

I hadn't thought about BattleBots in 20(?) years, until I recently showed the current season (the Golden Bolt tournament, aka "BattleBots 2015 Season 7" for some reason) to my son. It's good entertainment and a pretty solid show: the robot fighting is good, the whole thing is deliberately set up in the style of a boxing match (which works really well), everything is accessible to a younger or casual fan, and the robots and robot teams are the stars of it all. It's way better than I remembered. It's still got plenty of filler, but they only have so many minutes of robots fighting to fill the timeslot, so what can you do?

dieselgate2• 4 years ago

Wow cool to hear about battle bots after a long while for me too. Interesting to hear about filler content - I’ve felt from watching in the past the battles seem to be either short (with one bot dominating) or long (with both bots fairly equally match and a sort of “war of attrition” happening) without much in between. Would be curious if folks have seen the same (filler content in this context being relevant for shorter battles)

lowbloodsugar• 4 years ago

If wedges are a problem, why don’t they just make the arena an uneven surface ? Technology has advanced: the robots don’t need a nice smooth surface anymore.

georgyo2• 4 years ago

I don't think wedges are a problem anymore. The last 5 seasons have had almost no wedges. The article says they solved the problem by requiring a real active weapon.

But an uneven floor would likely cause mayhem for the massive amount of centrifical force these spinner bots have. Some bots might be able to handle it, but many would not.

dieselgate2• 4 years ago

Pardon me for being pedantic but I believe there is no such thing as centrifical force. It is a common confusion for either “centrifugal” or “centripetal” forces.

Edit: that’s a great point about the uneven flooring though! Would you expect bots to land belly up or their weapon-plane thrown off?

suzzer99• 4 years ago

Good lesson for the upcoming IRL robot wars. Just require your enemy to have a real active weapon.

bawolff• 4 years ago

Still, seems like having natural solution would be much better than doing it via a rule.

But an uneven floor would likely cause mayhem for the massive amount of centrifical force these spinner bots have. Some bots might be able to handle it, but many would not.

Sounds like a good thing to me. Introduces constraints and tradeoffs.

silisili• 4 years ago

It's funny because I've been watching battle bots of some form for seemingly decades, and the arms race happens just as in human history.

Early on people had all kinds of ideas...saw blades, flames, hammers, etc. Then a tiny wedge car showed up and just flipped them over.

Then people put something akin to a lawnmower blade on the front, near ground level, and sent those wedges flying. Another had nothing more than a small blade that rode on the ground, and on command, shot it up at a speed that would send anything on top of it twirling in the sky.

I don't think we should ban any one type. It's just incentive for people to do better.

ninth_ant• 4 years ago

The issue is most severe when two wedges "fight" each other. It's not captivating television for a mainstream audience -- though some diehards love the technical aspect of those matchups -- and some believe contributed to the cancellation of the original BB series.

The producers designed the rules for a show that they hope will deliver explosive action, relative to other tradeoffs.

antihero• 4 years ago

I have yet to see something as glorious as hypnodisc, from UK Robot Wars. Also Chaos II

hnburnsy• 4 years ago

Anyone notice the projectile firing robot in the Golden bolt season?. I had never seen that and was quite surprised that there are not safety issues with that.

mjg593• 4 years ago

That's https://battlebots.fandom.com/wiki/Double_Jeopardy. The design rules are https://battlebots.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/BattleBots... - there are some explicit rules around projectile weapons, but there's also a degree to which interesting robots are likely to be granted some leeway for the sake of spectacle, as long as the production team are convinced that safety won't be compromised.

mjg593• 4 years ago

For anyone interested in building such a robot with telemetry support, https://github.com/mjg59/robot_telemetry andhttps://github.com/mjg59/robot_telemetry_viewer are what ran on Hijinx for part of last year's season.

poleguy• 4 years ago

I can't find info on what radio you used. Code like this would be more fun to see with links to the hardware design. Is any of the design documented and published?

mjg593• 4 years ago

It was https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0768WQ989 but it cost significantly less than that at the time - there's a whole bunch of compatible devices. Basically anything that has a UART at one end and a USB adapter at the other end would work, but we chose something in the 915MHz range because the 2.4GHz spectrum on location is just lousy and it's not in the range that most teams run controllers so it wasn't likely to interfere with that either.

intothemild• 4 years ago

It is 2022, I am 40 years old, I am watching a darker, grittier Battlebots

_the_inflator• 4 years ago

I am impressed by their size. Up to 250US pound/113kg. In the trailers before the battles you have humans as scale. Some of the bots appear to be real large.

zeristor• 4 years ago

Isn’t this just like Robot Wars?

It is strange BBC 2 used to have the early evening inventor slot, it used to be The Great Egg Race, then several years later it was Robot Wars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Egg_Race

Seemingly more like The Great British Bake Off of invention.

https://youtu.be/7pvf6Xl9hQE

adhesive_wombat• 4 years ago

I think watching the success of RoadBlock (the wedge-shaped one which was just one big flipper) had quite a big impact on me: it was a perfect example of keep it simple and just solve the problem at hand, and do what you do do well.

IshKebab• 4 years ago

Yeah it is an adaption of Robot Wars for America. Apparently they did that for lots of countries.

theteapot2• 4 years ago

Are there any competitive ones with legs like the Boston Dynamics spot robot yet? Bored of all the wheels.

llimos• 4 years ago

The original version of the British form (Robot Wars) used to give an extra weight allowance to robots with legs, for the excitement factor. IIRC, it was abused by robots technically complying with lots of tiny "legs" that you couldn't actually see.

bnralt• 4 years ago

It seems like this would be best solved by creating an arena where legs had an advantage? The whole advantage of legs is that you can traverse areas that aren't unnaturally flat (almost all areas in real life).

Make every single arena a completely flat space where wheels are optimal and then given extra points to sub-optimal builds seems like it would be a poor way to approach things. It would be like giving extra points for creating an aquatic robot, but failing to create an arena with any water in it.

MontagFTB3• 4 years ago

The 2020 variant of Chomp was a walker, and allowed to push 500lbs as a result (the usual limit is 250lbs.)

https://battlebots.fandom.com/wiki/Chomp

an-honest-moose• 4 years ago

Mechadon(https://battlebots.fandom.com/wiki/Mechadon) is probably the best you're going to get. The problem with legs is that they're relatively slow, complicated, and difficult to protect when compared to wheels.

You may also find Snake interesting(https://battlebots.fandom.com/wiki/Snake).

LgWoodenBadger• 4 years ago

While not battle bots, I went down this rabbit hole pretty deep for a while.

Japanese wrestling robots https://youtu.be/-llRPCwIESQ

theteapot2• 4 years ago

LOL. Made my day. Cheers for that.

voldacar2• 4 years ago

I think that the optimal spinner would be basically impossible to defeat. You win by building up a ton of kinetic energy and dumping it into your opponent.

Consider what ziggo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuyG3FmixRI) could do as a lightweight. Now make it 100kg with tungsten teeth instead of steel and two counter-rotating hemispheres to cancel out the torque and let it turn on a dime. Put gear teeth on the inside of the shell and run multiple drive motors so that you can rev it up to full speed within the first few seconds of the match and then switch off drive motors as necessary to save power. With a heavyweight bot you have a big weight budget for powerful batteries and motors so I think you could fit several kilowatts of power for both the drive system and the wheels, which are important for a spinner since you need quick acceleration to outmaneuver your opponent and attack its weakest point. To protect from getting flipped, you could design the tooth lowest to the ground to be on a horizontal hinge with a linear actuator running through a hole in the shell, so that during the match you can lower it to the necessary angle to hit anything trying to slip underneath.

Napkin math: A 25kg shell, 1 meter diameter, spinning at 1000 rpm has about 17 kJ of rotational kinetic energy, (roughly equivalent to a .50 BMG bullet) so several kilowatts of power for a few seconds should be enough to rev up fully if friction is kept sufficiently low.

eckza• 4 years ago

Do you think that this hasn't been tried already?

tgv• 4 years ago

Just look at Tomb Stone: won several seasons, but then other people built better bots or knew how to use them more effectively.

voldacar2• 4 years ago

Yeah I don't see anyone using tungsten or counter-rotaying halves. And the heavy spinners are often slow to rev up

Someone2• 4 years ago

I don’t think there’s a global maximum. For example, to beat such a robot, build the same body without the spinner motor (or, if the rules disallow that, a much slower one). That gives you room to make it sturdier and/or faster. Without that heavy spinning mass it also likely will be easier to maneuver.

Now, when that hits its spinning counterpart, that spinner doesn’t only dump kinetic energy into its opponent; it also dumps it into itself, potentially more so if the enemy is heavier, so on an empty battlefield, the sturdier engine will (on average) win.

On a battlefield with hazards, the better maneuverability should tilt the favor more into the direction of the non- or slow-spinning version. It has more control over where and when the hits take place, so it can (statistically) push its opponent towards hazards.

I think the best strategy for the fast spinner would be to try and stay working, as the jury might give it a points victory on aggression.

mikewarot• 4 years ago

What the world needs is the opposite... battle-bots built out of Lego pieces (with no glue or other means of keeping them attached). This single constraint could lower the barriers to entry, and make it fun for everyone.

acapybara• 4 years ago

Seems like you could start this up pretty quickly.

Make a Twitch channel, get a few contestants and set a date for the first event!

adepressedthrow• 4 years ago

This is commonly done at Lego conventions, though usually not too many people participate.

Someone2• 4 years ago

https://battlebricks.org/

kibwen2• 4 years ago

I was lucky enough to be a builder on one of the teams for the 2018 season. I didn't get to design the robot, but I did get to machine and assemble parts of it and attended the filming in LA over a grueling two-week period of nonstop fighting, repairing, tweaking, and scrambling for parts. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

MontagFTB3• 4 years ago

What was the worst fight, won or lost, in terms of damage, and why was it so bad?

What was a design choice the team believed was solid, only to prove a weakness in the Battle Box?

How are these bots tested outside the arena? Do the equivalent of “friendlies” exist?

kibwen2• 4 years ago

What was the worst fight, won or lost, in terms of damage, and why was it so bad?

In our case it was really a death by a thousand cuts rather than any one match. Our bot was a heavy defensive wedge coupled with a thick vertical spinner. That may sound like the meta today, but back then the edge in the meta was still solidly in the realm of heavy horizontal spinners like Tombstone, and our design sacrificed offensive capability for the ability to tank massive horizontal blows to the wedge and spinner. It worked very well, we KO'd Son of Whyachi and destroyed Gigabyte's weapon with this strategy. But taking these blows on the chin over and over and over just rattled the bot apart over the tournament. Before our final match we realized there was nothing to it, we had to tear the bot down entirely and reassemble it with the freshest parts we could find. This was a nightmare; the bots aren't that complicated internally, but because of size and weight constraints and for the sake of survivability everything is very compact, interlocked, and secured. It was optimized for fighting, not easy maintainability, and that's what killed us. We were almost burnt out by this point and getting the bot back together again very nearly finished us off. Several times we put the bot together, then tested it, then something wouldn't work, so then we have to diagnose and tear the bot apart again and put it back together again, and then something else wouldn't work, and it goes round and round and round. Our team captain actually gave into despair at one point and wandered off in a fugue; our welder told us to keep working on the bot until she could manage to snap him out of it. We missed our match deadline, which is potentially grounds for disqualification, but we were lucky in that they had room the schedule to push us back by an hour or so. We finally managed to get everything working with mere moments to spare, but remember how I mentioned that our wedge had been tanking hits nonstop till this point? Well, while our wedge was hardened steel, our frame was just (thick) aluminum. More than 20 bolts held the wedge onto the frame, but all the bolt holes had suffered so much trauma from distributing the repeated impacts that in truth the wedge was barely hanging on by this point. With all the other things we had to do, there just wasn't time to manufacture a new frame or find a way to bore and tap new holes. Instead we found some metal inserts designed to let you "re-tap" holes that had been stripped out (I forget what they're called). But our final match was a three-way against two other vertical spinners, and in the opening moments End Game caught us under the chin at full spinup and absolutely blasted our wedge into the stratosphere, obliterating part of the ceiling rig and several lights in the process. It might as well have been held on with bubblegum. We weren't even mad, it was amazing carnage and we were howling with laughter at our now-headless robot.

What was a design choice the team believed was solid, only to prove a weakness in the Battle Box?

A weakness of vertical spinners (as opposed to vertical drums) is that they're not invertible, so getting flipped can mean game over if you're not ready for it. Our bot was designed so that if we got flipped, our wheels would still have contact so we could ram a wall in an attempt to self-right. Which worked (in both testing and in-match), but while flipped the front of the bot was riding on the weapon itself, and we were concerned about damaging it. So after we arrived at the filming we machined two little aluminum "rabbit ears" and topped them with slippery plastic, which also increased the height of the wedge's lip when inverted thereby making it easier to self-right by ramming. But this was our undoing. In our fight against Gigabyte we successfully destroyed their horizontal spinner, but in the process they rode up our wedge and snapped off exactly one of our rabbit ears. We should have won that match, but then somehow we wound up inverted and the remaining rabbit ear made us asymmetric and caused us to tip to one side, meaning that one wheel didn't have traction, so we were stuck. Heartbreaking.

How are these bots tested outside the arena? Do the equivalent of “friendlies” exist?

Teams will do their best to test, but these bots are so expensive (relative to our funding, anyway, which is essentially nil) and so labor-intensive to manufacture and assemble that only the most dedicated teams can afford real testing against other bots. For our bot we did organize an impromptu street fight outside of a bar in Boston (there are plenty of teams in the area to scrimmage with, and obviously for the safety of the public all the primary weapons were disabled). Then after we arrived in LA and unpacked the bot we ran it around an empty Target parking lot to make sure the drive wasn't damaged in shipping. For actual testing at the venue, they provide miniature versions of the arena for you to drive your bot around with the weapon working in a safe environment.

SeanLuke• 4 years ago

Disappointed not to see anything about Blendo, a 500rpm spinner from the mid and late 90s which, despite having a poor drive system, caused so much damage that it was twice disqualified due to insurance liability. Blendo was designed by Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, who as we all know went on to do nothing of importance. As I understand it, Blendo had a profound impact on the design of later robots.

https://battlebots.fandom.com/wiki/Blendo

adfm• 4 years ago

I was there in ‘95 and was wondering the same thing! It felt like they brought SRL to the kiddie pool that day.

bloaf• 4 years ago

Full body spinners are still a thing, see Gigabyte and Captain Shrederator. Unfortunately, their performance tends towards "middling" due to control and reliability issues.

The full body spinners struggle to keep spinning, as the forces of impact tend to ping-pong them around the arena. As long as their opponent can tank a hit and has a halfway competent driver, the spinners tend to end up corralled in a corner.

The latest season has an absolutely incredible match between Gigabyte and Hypershock.

foobarchu2• 4 years ago

While I'm still catching up on the modern incarnation (I just hit the post-season of the 2019 season, second one on discovery), you've also got the ones that are a sort of evolution of full-body spinners. In particular, Son Of Whyachi pretty consistently sends opponents flying or rips them apart without the stability/reliability issues of a Gigabyte or Shrederator. Bloodsport has also done some pretty solid damage with a smaller form-factor than Gigabyte during the 2019 season. They tend to be extremely chaotic fights.

I think my favorite example of the problems with class full-body spinners was in 2018 when an opponent managed to rip Gigabyte's outer shell off in one piece.

ThreeOne• 4 years ago

We should never forgot about SON OF WHYACHI either

JoeAltmaier3• 4 years ago

When do we get 'Ultimate Battle Bots'?

No limits - explosives, flames, chemical attack, projectiles. Total destruction!

Viewed remotely for safety - armored cameras and drone shots, displayed on big screens!

LandStander• 4 years ago

Then you just get modern warfare miniaturized. I guess that could be fun to watch if well presented, but I've been thinking it would be cool to just have a bigger, more rugged battlebox that demands more versatile movement, rather then having everyone just trying to hug the metal floor as closely as possible.

JoeAltmaier3• 4 years ago

Really? Machine guns and flamethrowers you 'guess' could be fun to watch? I'd rather watch that, than a glorified pancake flipper.

But never mind us. Do we imagine there isn't a market for battle robot shows with grenades and machine guns?

Do it in an arena, and there you are: a hit show. Put cameras on all the bots so we can get into the action.

{edit: arena}

MonkeyMalarky• 4 years ago

A larger arena, possibly outside in a field or rocky-ish desert area with 5v5 battles would be a lot more interesting. The large team sizes would spice up the plain old spinner vs flipper dynamic. The cameras filming it could just be drones following the battle from above.

krisoft• 4 years ago

explosives, flames, chemical attacks, projectiles? You think too small. The clear winner of the no limits battle bots are nuclear tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Or whoever nudges asteroids to collide with Earth such that the crust melts evenly.

Faster, Meaner, Deadlier: The Evolution of “BattleBots”

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