
BattleBots Is Back - Flemlord
http://www.battlebots.com/BattleBots.com/Home/Home.html
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mechanical_fish
Years ago I attended the last two BattleBots tapings on Treasure Island. Words
fail me when I try to describe how much fun it is to watch BattleBots live.

I had never seen the TV show when I bought my first BattleBots tickets (while
randomly browsing Craigslist). After getting home from the live version, I
tried to watch the show a little. I can't stand the TV version. It bore the
same relationship to the actual event that a QVC infomercial about Matchbox
cars does to a real Corvette.

The one drawback of BattleBots (specifically) is that it appears to threaten
to consume all of the builders' money and then come back for more. After a
while, watching high-performance motor controllers get bounced off the
Plexiglas, one after another, can start to make you wince. It might be cheaper
to just buy a lawnmower and push it back and forth over a big stack of $5
bills. If I were actually going to build a bot I might choose to enter a
competition where more of the pieces make it back home intact.

UPDATE: On the other hand, it's undeniable that watching things catch fire,
get mangled, or be sacrificed in bold gambits is part of the fun.

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replicatorblog
This is great news. It seemed like BattleBots was just a couple years too
early for its time. With the wide availability of Lego NXT, Arduino, and an
overall "hardware hacking" ethos permeating tech culture this could catch on
in a much bigger way. Best of luck to them!

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jerf
Battlebots didn't end because it was ahead of its time. In my opinion,
Battlebots ended because the ruleset created an optimal robot ("spin as much
of your mass as possible as fast as possible and hit the other robot before
they do the same") and it became boring to watch the two resulting fights:
"Optimal robot utterly destroys non-optimal robot in one blow" and "two
optimal robots charge directly at each other and in one blow the match is
resolved". Note the "one blow" in both descriptions... which of course is not
to say it was "one blow" in literally every fight, but it often was.

If they're going to succeed, they're going to have to tune the rules better,
but that causes its own problems as people start to feel Battlebots is
stacking the deck against effective robots... which is in fact exactly what
they are doing, after all. Maybe if they are open about what they are doing
and tune the rules carefully after each competition, they can keep the fun
factor up, but no matter how you slice it, they walk a delicate line between
actually effective robots and interesting-to-watch robots.

I don't know that there have been any terribly interesting technological
advances that would change the equation about whether Battlebots is "ahead of
its time". Under the scenario in question, putting any sort of clever logic on
board of any kind (autonomous or human-assisted) is just adding a complicated
part that will die on the first blow, so where a lot of the advances have
occurred isn't really relevant to Battlebots.

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queensnake
Yeah I'd like to see them climb in sophistication, be autonomous too; maybe
make them find each other on a lumpy battlefield, via vision or something. CPU
power has gotten much cheaper since the last time they were current. It was
just hardware.

You (or at least I, rather) want the competition to be in brain power or
behavior rather than just gimmicky hardware. It risks not being as popular
but, /simulated/ robots could have unlimited hardware and computation power.
If you got interesting behaviors like stalking, maybe decoying, whatever. You
could at least render the fight beautifully, to make up partially for the lack
of it being real. The sophistication of the hardware would be unlimited, you
could have one roll up in a ball or otherwise change shape. And, that would be
/some/ platform for botmaking. I think the physics models are powerful enough
to model damage. Dayam, someone should do this.

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jerf
"You (or at least I, rather) want the competition to be in brain power or
behavior rather than just gimmicky hardware."

To be honest, I don't really care. They need to embrace the fact that it's a
show, an artificial competition where rule #1 is "the fights must be
interesting to human beings" and #2 is "the fight must be fair in the sense
that everybody knew this year's rules at the same time and everybody is
working under the same rules". How they get there is up to them.

I think to fit into their original niche, they need to be real, physical
robots for most people to care, and unfortunately given the nature of the
competition it seems unlikely that autonomous logic is going to play a big
role.

Although one thought did occur to me that I feel stupid for not realizing
before. I am very skeptical of the ability of complicated circuitry to survive
on the robot itself, but of course there's no reason not to put the logic up
there with the human, getting remote sensor data and issuing commands. _Duh!_
Now we're cooking with fire. Full autonomy still seems like asking for trouble
but I often thought some computer-aided targeting assistance could have been
helpful.

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ivankirigin
They need to lift the size restriction, and make a fully autonomous category.
I want to see the DARPA Grand Challenge entrants try to destroy each other.

Of course, they'd need to increase the size of the purse. They could possibly
be solved with bigger venues and more expensive tickets. The marginal cost of
a robot car is probably around $175K, depending on the sensors. It would be
fun to make active sensor denial weapons, to blind lasers or cameras.

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Flemlord
"Unfortunately, the April 2009 event will not be open to the public. However,
future events will be. Keep checking the website for future details."

Does anybody know how to get tickets?

~~~
kqr2
There's also robogames:

<http://www.robogames.net/>

