This could be awesome! I think many FIRST teams should consider it, if it pans out. For years battlebots has suffered from poor organization, but hopefully no longer :).
To be honest I don’t really dig robot fight shows, its a lot of money (aka: thousands more than a FIRST bot) to be wasting on something that will get torn up in a match or two. Its also less about the science and stuff behind the machine and more about the spectacle of two things tearing each other apart.
Or I’m just sick of being confused with Battlebots… regardless, thats my two cents.
I do find it interesting that, ten years after BattleBots went off the air, I still get that every time I talk about FRC. (Even last night, I got that.)
I was talking with friends over Facebook and Twitter about an opening for a full-contact competition–task-based, no destructive weapons (tipping and ramming is in, flamethrowers and saws are out), robots somewhere in between FRC and FTC/VRC in scale, and leave your bumpers at home. I imagine there’s got to be room in the middle.
Have you ever heard of Jerry Sanders? http://jsdc.ec.illinois.edu/
Competition held at UIUC, and used to be quite big I hear. Still has about 15ish teams, from 4 universities I believe.
Although, the concept of alliances, is like soo fricking cool. I mean the bridge-balancing this year, is nothing like JSDC.
Whatever happened to that Battlebots thing ESPN was supposedly doing?
it died after they couldn’t sell the advertising space for the show. the footage still exists and some is on youtube… http://www.youtube.com/user/BattleBotsTV?ob=0
the speculation from the robot combat community is this is going to be real steel style biped robots, not traditional combat robots.
So if ESPN can’t make it work what makes James Cameron think he’s going to succeed? I think we’re in for another false start on this again.
about every year or so battlebots has some tv deal that falls through.
Battlebots is so last century. The idea needs an upgrade.
Which forum is this? I haven’t been into it for a few years now. Would be nice to get back into it. I still have parts somewhere to build a bot.
Sign me up 
Three things:
- Mark Burnett is behind a metric ton of successful TV shows. Survivor, The Apprentice, The Voice, etc. Clearly he’s figured something out.
- James Cameron is very much a figure-out-a-new-way-to-show-this kind of guy.
- Discovery has shown occasional one-off combat robot shows already, and they’ve already seen the returns on tapping that community. (Consider that 60% of the cast of Mythbusters had notable combat robots.)
If anything is going to jump-start the genre, it’s this group.
I’m inclined to agree; the format has gone basically unchanged: get too low to be wedged, avoid the hazards, out-push your opponent, and have something capable of spinning up a wallop or flipping your opponent. Even different terrain would make it more interesting–imagine an arena covered in driveway gravel and what it would do to our mental image of a combat robot. Very different game then.
This is something that would be fun to explore, if there were enough teams in an area to get a proper event together. It’s interesting to note that all the folks I talked with before you posted were in Florida. Parking lot showdown after next year’s Orlando Regional?
the robot fighting league forum http://forums.delphiforums.com/THERFL
the sport has really evolved in the past few years. robots have gotten more destructive and cheaper with icbm’s (inexpensive chinese burshless motors), lipo batteries and other cheaper electronics. the other big change is the “sportsman class” which outright bans wedges and high kinetic energy weapons, which leaves room for more creative bots. arena hazards also don’t exist anymore and floors are often plywood which gets scared and chewed up which creates an uneven surface which forces robots to have a higher ground clearance.
for anyone who’s interested and in florida there is a battebots event coming up soon http://buildersdb.com/eventdetail.asp?eventid=348
I dont think that the whole battle bots hasn’t completed gone away. I know that there is a program that like FIRST you can join but more like battle bots. The program is called bots IQ. I know when I was in High School there was both a FRC team and a bots IQ team.
botsiq is kinda dead on the national level, it still lives on in florida. the big high school combat programs are nrl http://gonrl.org/ and mrl http://www.midwestroboticsleague.org/. nerc also allows high school class robots to enter http://nerc.us/