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In response to
"Saudi Arabia Hasn’t Bought WWE Yet, But Its Wrestlers Should Be Ready -- (link)"
by
Beaker
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The Coolest BattleBots, According To Me, A BattleBot Sicko
Posted by
JD (aka Jason Dean)
Jan 12 '23, 08:35
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In Slack we were talking about BattleBots—totally normal workplace behavior, not what this blog is about, this conversation is over—and suddenly it dawned on me that I had named, like, 20 different battlebots. A frankly kind of alarming number of battlebots for a just-about-42-year-old non-roboticist to know by name. Opinions were bubbling up out of me: why the more elaborate bots tend to get wrecked by the simpler, more elegant ones; the value of fire as a secondary weapon; which edition of Chomp was the best. I was recalling the tactics of specific bot … drivers(?), and memorable moments from specific matches. I guess I had not thought to regard myself as a BattleBots sicko before this, but also I think I can no longer deny being one.
BattleBots—not the long-dead Comedy Central series, but the far better version resurrected on the ABC network in 2015 and then ported over to the Discovery Channel in 2018—was a deep-pandemic infatuation in my house, but unlike sourdough or watching the OTB feed of horse races, a deserving one: It’s a good time. Robots, mangling each other! Robots sometimes exploding or flying apart! Hell yeah. We on-demanded every episode of every edition of the show we could find, at least once. My kids have a handful of teeny little radio-controlled bot replicas, and a mini arena for warring them against each other, all of which they’ve outgrown. Somewhere along the way I seem to have absorbed more information about and developed more thoughts on BattleBots than I’d realized. Anyway here are some battlebots that I like.
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