Its organizers call it the first sport to break into popular culture in the new century. The competition pits remote-controlled, spinning, stabbing robots against each other in three-minute jousts to the death. At the end of each fight, either one of the bots is a smoking, immobile wreck or the judges decide who scored the most blows. Last year the biannual tournament, which is taped and edited into the rampantly popular “Battlebots” TV show on Comedy Central, drew about 150 contestants. This week’s event in San Francisco will feature 500. Most can charitably be described as unathletic science-minded types, drawn to a venue where they can flex their strongest muscle–their brain–in front of a raucous crowd and a TV audience. “There has never been a home for intelligent people to show their stuff to everyone else,” says Trey Roski, 36, who started “Battlebots” with his cousin Greg Munson, 35. “Now there’s a forum for them to rock.”
In case you need any more evidence that the sport of robotic combat has arrived, consider this: the show attracts more than a million viewers each week and is the third most popular program on Comedy Central, after “South Park” and “The Man Show.” “Battlebots” has also spawned a line of toys due this summer from Hasbro and Jakks Pacific, and a litany of imitators like “Robotica” and “Junkyard Wars” on The Learning Channel. Moreover, last month cable giant Viacom licensed “Robot Wars,” a similar show in Britain, for broadcast this fall on TNN. And Roski and his staff are negotiating to stage a high-schoolers-only version of the sport, dubbed “Battlebots IQ,” that would air on Fox’s Saturday-morning schedule.
Robotic combat has come a long way since its inception in the Bay Area in the ’90s. The sport was invented in 1993 by artist Marc Thorpe, a former special-effects designer at George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic. From ‘94 to ‘97, Thorpe’s tournament, called Robot Wars, brought together a few dozen hard-core gearheads and their saw-wielding, pincer-stabbing creations. After a prolonged and messy legal tussle between Thorpe and his main investor, the event shut down in 1998. The next year it split into “Robot Wars” in Britain and “Battlebots” in the United States.
Today, in the grease-stained garages and dimly lit workshops of the show’s obsessed participants, the focus is squarely on the upcoming single-elimination tournament. The competition takes place in the Battlebox, a 48-square-foot ring, raised two feet off the ground and made of unbreakable Lexan polycarbonate. It’s equipped with mechanical hazards–spikes, blades and hammers that randomly emerge from the walls and floors. Winners in each of the four weight categories get a trophy in the shape of a giant metallic nut, prizes of up to $8,000–and a $1,600 check each time Comedy Central broadcasts one of their bouts.
This week’s tournament will draw the usual lot of veterans like Smentowski and his friend Stephen Felk, whose 210-pound heavyweight Voltronic races around at 15mph and uses a lifting arm to hook and drag opponents into the hazards. Felk’s been competing since 1999, and estimates he’s spent some five years and 25 grand pursuing his hobby in his one-bedroom San Francisco apartment, which features a six-foot-tall band saw wedged into a kitchen corner. “I’d be better off if I was on heroin, because at least heroin’s cheaper, and with heroin you have a social life,” he says. Still, Felk’s matches have been broadcast on the show seven times. As a result, he recently received a letter from a young fan (“I am writing you because you are my role model”) and a free cabin upgrade from a flight attendant who recognized him standing in line at the airport.
Veterans like Felk will face serious new competition this week. The show has attracted the attention of deep thinkers at universities like MIT and U.S. military personnel like Cadet Jonathan Mueller. A future pilot studying at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Mueller learned about robotic combat at the base’s only bar, which airs “Battlebots” every Tuesday night. Now he’s turned the senior design project for his electrical-engineering degree into Mordicus (Latin for teeth), a middleweight bot armed with two horizontally spinning saw blades. Unlike their competitors, Mueller and another cadet have built all the components for their bots from scratch, and during battle they’ll wear their official flight uniforms. “I have two goals,” says Mueller. “I want to honor my family and I want to represent the Air Force well. Whatever it takes to get that done, I’ll do it.”
“Battlebots” organizers plan to break the event into regional qualifying competitions next year. For now, anyone can enter. That means the hard-core engineers at the Air Force could come up against one of the several high-school teams that will attend, like the robotics squad of Plymouth North in Massachusetts. Teacher Michael Bastoni (Mr. B.) and his 20 students have spent countless afternoons, weekends and snow days since last fall building two bots. One of them, Reactor, sports a sharp edge wrapped around a spinning 80-quart aluminum bread bowl (borrowed from the school’s cafeteria). The design uses centrifugal force to lift and fling opponents away. Recently, the kids were testing it in the school hallway when a radio receiver flew off and cracked a window. Mr. B., who combines the sternness of a football coach with a science teacher’s patience, considers it all a learning experience. “The good news is, any of these kids could tell you the velocity of the radio when it left the robot,” he says.
All of these dedicated bot makers envision a future where robotic combat is as big as NASCAR. Like stock-car teams, they’re already recruiting corporate sponsors to cover the mounting costs of building a durable bot, which can reach more than $50,000. Reactor, for instance, sports the logo of power company Entergy.
But the sport has several obstacles to climb before it enjoys anything near the popularity of a NASCAR or professional wrestling. First, the litigation that derailed “Robot Wars” in the United States continues to brew. Still sore over the original scuffle for control in 1998, the owners of that show in Britain recently sued Trey Roski in New York federal court on a litany of charges, including breach of contract.
Meanwhile, with his planned high-school competition “Battlebots IQ,” Roski is invading the turf of friendlier robotic contests like FIRST. That’s an annual tournament where students work with real engineers to build bots capable of tasks like picking up rings and placing them on pegs. FIRST was founded in 1989 by Dean Kamen, known as the inventor of the futuristic wheelchair iBot, which climbs stairs, and the mysterious Ginger. He thinks “Battlebots” is too violent and, according to participants in both contests, asks parts manufacturers who supply FIRST teams not to sell to “Battlebots” squads. Says one “Battlebots” contestant, “We have this divide at a time that’s inopportune for the development of robotic sports.”
For now, “Battlebots” participants are worrying only about getting ready for the upcoming tournament. Back at Plymouth North, Mr. B.’s students are trying to fix a loose wire that’s preventing Reactor’s bread-bowl top from spinning. When one student goes into the bot’s metallic guts with a pair of needle-nose pliers, he hits a sensitive transistor, sending a cloud of sickly blue smoke into the air. Mr. B. is angry and, like a football coach, lets the student know it. Later he says, “This is a learning moment, it has to happen.” This week his team will try to apply those moments in the Battlebox. And if they’re lucky and their bots prove resilient, they’ll find TV cameras, a live cheering audience and an atmosphere that’s just as fraught with competitive tension as anything experienced by their classmates on the football field.
