BattleBots & ESPN Strike TV Deal

NMajik writes "Although BattleBots has been largely removed from the public eye since episodes stopped airing years ago, a new deal has recently been struck with ESPN to return combat robots to the living room. Episodes will be broadcast as a series on ESPNU and ESPN2 after filmed at the competition in June 2008. This is the first notable progress towards televised combat robotics in years."

Robot Wars...

[Wizard Drongo]

Dunno if any of you over the other side of the pond ever got this show, it stopped in 2003, and was presented by Craig Charles (oh he of Red Dwarf fame).
Was an awesome program, with a whole load of different teams, ranging from a 13 year old girl with her Dad to a major university grad team and a Army engineers team.
Was pretty decent in it's day. Maybe they should bring this back.

Re:Ah but it's fun to speculate...

[PhireN]

FTA:

New Experimental Class
For both competitions, BattleBots would like to open the door to a new "anything goes," experimental class. There are NO rules and NO weights for this class.

So the answer is yes, as long as you enter into the experimental class, otherwise check the rules.

Re:Ah but it's fun to speculate...

[Torvaun]

This guy [news.com] is going to kick ass in the experimental class.

The rules are here [battlebots.com], if you don't mind pdfs.

Weapon types that aren't allowed in the normal class include electricity and electromagnetic weapons (no EMP or Tesla coils), weapons that require significant cleanup (sand, oil, liquids, ball bearings), weapons intended to obscure vision (smoke, strobe lights), thermal weapons (no explosives or cutting torches, although you can use explosives to, say, drive a piston), mechanism fouling weapons (nets, tarps, caltrops), and no mutually destructive mechanisms.

There are also restricted weapons. Projectiles are allowed, but must be on a tether of no more than 8' in length. Covering weapons are allowed, but must be rigid and controllable. Airbags are allowed, but must conform to the rules for pneumatics, and can't be used as mechanism fouling weapons when deflated. Flywheels need to be installed properly, so that they don't fly off or apart while spinning. Large springs (20 lbs of force to extend or compress) need to be armed by the bot, not manually, and need to be able to be released manually without causing damage to the person doing the releasing.

Re:not robots

[Anonymous Coward]

The word Robot does not imply something is autonomous. Here are the Robotics institute of America's four classes of robots:

        * A: Handling devices with manual control
        * B: Automated handling devices with predetermined cycles
        * C: Programmable, servo-controlled robots with continuous of point-to-point trajectories
        * D: Robots capable of Type C specifications which also acquire information from the environment for intelligent motion

As you can see, battlebots clearly fall into category A.

Re:Host?

[Anonymous Coward]

you do realize that jamie hyneman has a history with battlebots, right?

http://www.battlebots.com/meet_the_robots3/meet_team_profile.asp?id=47 [battlebots.com]

from wikipedia: The robot had a shell made from a wok and was spun by a lawnmower engine. Blades attached to the shell caused grievous damage to its opponents, removing bodywork and in some instances causing them to be thrown over the Lexan safety shields into the audience. After two fights it was deemed too hazardous to compete by the event supervisors and the insurance company. It was given co-champion status in exchange for withdrawing from the competition.[2]

and grant imahara of the mythbusters secondary team built deadblow, a decent ranked lightweight bot:
http://www.deadblow.net/Pages/NEWCREW.htm [deadblow.net]

Re:Ah but it's fun to speculate...

[MattHawk]

Part of the reason for things being banned is a simple matter of safety. I've competed at several robot combat events with a middleweight, and even with the extremely strict safety rules and the high tech arenas, some of them are freaking dangerous. I've been within a few feet of an arena breach at one point, where some of the heavier robots hit a wall hard enough to come up over the safety stop and almost go through the bulletproof Lexan arena wall (fortunately neither robot managed to come clear out of the arena, but they knocked a wall section out and very nearly did). There have also been incidents of robots with cutting weapons putting holes clear through the wall (and at least one incident I know of where a robot put a hole in a 1/2" thick steel plate that was part of the arena safety system). The safety crew at the events takes these things very seriously - the fight IMMEDIATELY stops if there's any threat of the arena being breached, and the robots are disabled until the situation can be evaluated, but that's with the limited scope of the current rules - many of the things people would love to see in the robots would be damn near impossible to do safely around an audience.

Even if there isn't an audience, there's still the crews to think about. People have to work around the robots to repair them (many of the rules involve safeguarding the robot when it's around people), and to load them into and out of the arena. Also, some of these robots get torn up pretty badly, hence rules relating to making sure the robots aren't hazardous to clean up after they've gotten heavily damaged.