16 ms·

MegaBots calls it a day, puts fighting robot up for sale on eBay

99 points by worstestes 7y ago

magashna 7y ago
Those giant robots are years away from having the mobility needed for entertaining combat. I feel like we peaked with BattleBots nearly 20 years ago, early on before the spinning doom meta took over. There was fun stuff like that bot that had a net in a giftwrapped box, basically begging for a spinbot to tear into it and get paralyzed. Young me has a lot of nostalgia for that, but the new season they tried was not great.
- k__ 7y ago
  Did they try new rules or something? Like going bigger every year, etc. This could have led to an evolutionary path to big bots with good mobility.
  - magashna 7y ago
    They had a heavyweight class but in the end, spinning really fast crushed all competition at every level from what I remember. Any design that deviated was a novelty, and I can see why you wouldn't want to bother with an interesting design, only to have it ripped apart in a few seconds. There were some flippers, some hammers, some flamethrowers, but spinning really fast always tore into them instantly. Kinda made it boring after the first few seasons. I'd be on board again if there wasn't such an obvious winning strategy. They banned nets, but they should probably ban spinners as well.
    - icebraining 7y ago
      Have they tried drones yet? There's probably a nice challenge in having to balance weapons weight + battery weight + battery capacity + maneuverability.
      - wtracy 7y ago
        Behold, robot sumo fights: https://youtu.be/4qHe5K3KktY https://youtu.be/4qHe5K3KktY For the most part, nobody is insane enough to battle autonomous robots with destructive weapons on board.
      - michaelt 7y ago
        People have tried such things [1] I would say it doesn't make for particularly good viewing. Every engagement sends one or both drones involved to the ground, which rewards not engaging. Although perhaps more sophisticated rules could improve on that? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFiYqVKFJ0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFiYqVKFJ0U
        germinalphrase 7y ago
        Obviously, the drones need to learn how to grapple.
    - logfromblammo 7y ago
      Well, the obvious counter to spinners is nets and loose fibers, or otherwise fouling the spinner's bearings, so it's like banning paper from a rock-paper-scissors tournament. Everybody's gonna throw rock, and the people who still throw scissors because rock is boring get creamed. Ablative spinner shields are too heavy, and get in your way as much as they get in the spinner's way.
    - aidenn0 7y ago
      Spinners won because they were the only thing left that could damage the typical armor, and most robots ended up with self-righting mechanisms to defeat flippers. IIRC good pushers could still compete with spinners though.
- drakenot 7y ago
  What kind of advances do we need to make for robots of this size to have the kind mobility that people would generally expect?
  - saalweachter 7y ago
    About ten years of lowering people's expectations for how mobile a 15-ton robot should be.
  - myself248 7y ago
    Financing. MegaBots was founded by a couple of controls engineers who had done the math and figured they could make a real bipedal walking mecha with current technology, if only someone else would fund it. Not that much money materialized, also falling on your face hurts when your face started 15 feet in the air, so the current gen went with a tracked base instead. But the tech can be done, we just need to get the pilots out and the money raised.
    - Animats 7y ago
      There's no market. You can build it, but so far, they don't come. Honda's Asimo. Boston Dynamics's Atlas. Schaft's humanoid (probably the best one to date). Deere's legged logging machine. All never got beyond a few prototypes. None of them work well enough to do anything useful. I used to work on this stuff, back in the 1990s. I have two patents in that area. (The big insight is that legs are for traction control - you can mess with the contact normal in useful ways. As soon as you get off flat terrain, traction control dominates the problem.) I could never see a market for legged machines. Too expensive for toys. Not useful enough for much else. Boston Dynamics has gone from sugar daddy to sugar daddy for decades - first DARPA, then Google, then Softbank. Today, they finally launched a product, their cute little all-electric Spot robot.[1] No price given. [1] https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot
      - kortex 7y ago
        It's still too expensive vs the gained utility. Given a tradeoff of very expensive and finnicky hardware, vs offroad wheels, use animals, or just pay humans, the robot loses. A big part of that cost is the drive train and transmission. You need low speed and tons of torque, so this usually means geardowns. Not that the software NRE costs are trivial, but they can be amortized. But building even a single basic six axis arm with human comparable strength is gonna cost several grand.
- rasz 7y ago
  >I feel like we peaked with BattleBots nearly 20 years ago Let me introduce you to the present https://www.robomaster.com/en-US https://www.robomaster.com/en-US https://www.twitch.tv/robomaster/videos https://www.twitch.tv/robomaster/videos FPV controlled, computer vision oriented, AI enhanced (gun controllers/target tracking is fully automated).
  - magashna 7y ago
    That looks pretty cool, but I definitely have a soft spot for the jank that was in the scene 20 years ago. Back when it was more like pro wrestling
- dublinben 7y ago
  You might feel that the competitiveness of BattleBots peaked 20 years ago, but combat robots have only continued to get better in the time since. Advancements in battery technology, motors, 3D modeling, and other technologies have made today's combots significantly better than those of your youth.
  - XMPPwocky 7y ago
    Better at winning, sure. Better at being interesting to watch, though?
    - xwdv 7y ago
      It’s kind of like how the golden age of warfare was during World War 2. Gritty massive battles with lots of deaths and drama, mixed with a variety of emerging tech and well balanced strength between all opponents. Today’s wars are better, but not as interesting.
      - Consultant32452 7y ago
        Don't worry, the next all out war will be "interesting." Countless drones, extended periods without electricity, global oil supply chains disrupted, it will be very very bad.
        xwdv 7y ago
        For you. By then I hope to be living entirely off grid in some place nobody gives a fuck about, years behind on current events. It’s only a matter of securing enough money.
- giggles_giggles 7y ago
  You know BattleBots has been on a new run since 2015? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleBots#Season_6_(2015) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleBots#Season_6_(2015) I cannot vouch for this being high quality TV but the spinning meta was broken somehow. There are still a number of spinners, but other designs do OK (drums, flippers, combinations of these things, even some flamethrower bots). On that note I can vouch for this being highly entertaining low quality TV, and with all the sponsorships and kids you see in the stands, I do hope it's helping to inspire a new generation of roboticists :)
  - lahwran 7y ago
    So they invited the public to come watch in a venue in the north bay a year or two ago, an hour ish north of sf, and I went - it was, eh, okay. They wanted the crowd to perform cheering and stuff, it was really more like being an extra. The fights were cool, but it was pretty optimized for being a tv show and not very optimized for being a tv replay of a live show. Shrug, seems fine for what it is, just for what it's worth.
    - wnissen 7y ago
      It sucks for the audience. Sadly RoboGames didn't do a show this year, they are a ton of fun to watch. I hope they come back.
  - wnissen 7y ago
    The producers deliberately pick interesting robots (and teams) instead of the most likely to win.
- dmix 7y ago
  Was there any competition between spinners? It’s be funny if everyone showed up with variations on the spinner because they win. Some of them are just toys to be destroyed by the better bots, many with little strategy. But getting one to work is still an achievement IMO. There’s just going to be a finite pool of talent to produce enough of them. This makes me want to watch a battle again.
nickthegreek 7y ago
ebay link has some shots of the cockpit. https://www.ebay.com/itm/133181448480 https://www.ebay.com/itm/133181448480 15 tons!
- eli_gottlieb 7y ago
  $50,000, huh? I could liquidate my retirement account to buy a giant robot.
  - eschneider 7y ago
    Then use it to rob a bank. Gotta spend money to make money. Seriously though, there's a giant CASE front end loader parked at a construction site right next to a jewelry store on the way home from work. So tempting, but so wrong...
    - madamelic 7y ago
      >giant CASE front end loader Fun fact, apparently most construction equipment use the same keys [1] and the keys can be bought with no proof of ownership. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07J37ZZRC https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07J37ZZRC
      - mikestew 7y ago
        Used to be that the “key” could be a pocket knife in the right hands. They fixed that about 30 or 40 years ago when folks started to figure that out.
      - natmaka 7y ago
        Deviant Ollam showed that some/many US police cars also use the same keys, which also are easy to buy.
- Ajedi32 7y ago
  There are plenty of videos on their YouTube channel showing how to operate the controls too. It's really fascinating stuff; though I imagine keeping it maintained is a bit of a nightmare.
corodra 7y ago
I'm not trying to be too much of an ass... but is anyone really surprised? The whole thing seemed like a gag from the beginning. Was it really taken seriously? Reading that it has problems with soft dirt is kind of sad too. Plus, it took them $2.5m for just the robot? I hope that's incorrect in the article and those funds include business expenses too. Because that's really bad management... wait, it all makes more sense now.
- 2muchcoffeeman 7y ago
  I’m surprised this was a company. I thought it was some one off build for a bit of fun.
  - corodra 7y ago
    Right? I kind of feel like I'm taking crazy pills finding out this was meant as a serious company.
    - madamelic 7y ago
      At least it wasn't VC-funded. Can't wait for the RFS for "giant robots"
  - ohazi 7y ago
    Think of it like the company behind a monster truck team. The revenue and (maybe) profit comes from spectator shows / events / competitions against Japan. It definitely wasn't supposed to be "Giant Robot, the startup."
- LeifCarrotson 7y ago
  As someone extensively familiar with Parker hydraulics and custom machine building (for industrial automation, not fighting robots...), $2.5m is not that bad. I spent about 1/3rd of that to build up a shaker table for heavy equipment, with nothing more than a 120HP electric hydraulic power pack and a pair of 120mm Parker hydraulic actuators, mechanical fabrication, civil engineering, associated servovalves, motion controllers, sensors, PLC/PC controls...etc. That was a static installation, not a vehicle, which costs more. If I had to quote a competitor machine with a well-defined spec - this had none, so you're basically paying for a couple revisions of the design - I'd figure on the order of 1200 hours of mechanical engineering/CAD at $80/hr, 1600 hours of electrical engineering/programming at $100/hr, 2000 hours of skilled fabricator/machinist time at $40/hr, plus project management/purchasing/legal and other overhead, which puts you at close to $1M just in labor. It would be challenging to source the industrial lego that powers this thing for less than $1.5M; I expect that they're charging nothing for some of their labor, using cheaper materials (eg. start with used digger tracks instead of buying something off the shelf) to make this come out as low as $2.5M.
throwaway66920 7y ago
Amused that it is listed as pre owned on eBay
- Ajedi32 7y ago
  > Seller Notes: “A few dings and dents from engaging in close-quarters nation-on-nation combat for technological supremacy with Japan's most famous giant robot.”
worstestes 7y ago
one of my favorites from their FAQ in the eBay listing: Third, Eagle Prime has a lot of hydraulic hoses and connectors. During the course of operation, it will usually spring a hydraulic leak maybe every 4 hours or so of driving and crushing. So far, every leak we’ve been able to fix with a standard set of large wrenches and a replacement o-ring. I’ll include a bunch
- kfarr 7y ago
  Another gem: > The giant cannon may or may not work since we used it as a battering ram in the fight with japan, but it should be repairable.
thoughtpalette 7y ago
I do want to say I met Matt Oehrlein at a maker-space in Ferndale, MI before he went on to create MegaBots. The guy is crazy talented with his hands, as well as a super personable and kind person. I'm sure he'll have some more cool and fun endeavors in the future. Will be keeping a lookout for his name!
- myself248 7y ago
  You should know that makerspace is not bankrupt, actually alive and well after 10 years, and expanding (having signed the lease on the other half of the building, and raising funds to build it out) right now! Come on back for a visit, you'll find a welcoming community and tons of creative stuff going on.
  - thoughtpalette 7y ago
    I wish I lived there! Was a really cool space.
excalibur 7y ago
My wife says I can't buy it, sorry guys.
- caseysoftware 7y ago
  You can get remarried.
Mathnerd314 7y ago
I guess the market is in small robots, e.g. the micromouse competitions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16003683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16003683 YouTube doesn't even like robot fights: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/youtube-robot-combat-videos-animal-cruelty-a9071576.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
bdcravens 7y ago
"So we’re selling the assets of the company to pay back the bank as much as possible, before we file the final bankruptcy paperwork." I thought when bankruptcy is inevitable, you'd want to wait for the final judgment before liquidating.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
Wow, I cannot believe I'm seriously considering bidding on this thing :-).
29athrowaway 7y ago
It would have been better with no humans inside the robots, so the fight could be more violent.
- rozab 7y ago
  More violent fights would ruin their already-awful profit margin. Since they don't want to smash up the robots anyway, may as well put a human in there
  - 29athrowaway 7y ago
    BattleBots is more entertaining to watch. They tried to add some excitement with commentary, but it didn't work.
smokelegend 7y ago
Have you seen the 2019 Atlas... brilliantly scary! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E
- ASalazarMX 7y ago
  The slight wear on its body makes it look even more impressive.

99 points by worstestes 7y ago

Those giant robots are years away from having the mobility needed for entertaining combat. I feel like we peaked with BattleBots nearly 20 years ago, early on before the spinning doom meta took over. There was fun stuff like that bot that had a net in a giftwrapped box, basically begging for a spinbot to tear into it and get paralyzed. Young me has a lot of nostalgia for that, but the new season they tried was not great.

k__ 7y ago
Did they try new rules or something? Like going bigger every year, etc. This could have led to an evolutionary path to big bots with good mobility.
- magashna 7y ago
  They had a heavyweight class but in the end, spinning really fast crushed all competition at every level from what I remember. Any design that deviated was a novelty, and I can see why you wouldn't want to bother with an interesting design, only to have it ripped apart in a few seconds. There were some flippers, some hammers, some flamethrowers, but spinning really fast always tore into them instantly. Kinda made it boring after the first few seasons. I'd be on board again if there wasn't such an obvious winning strategy. They banned nets, but they should probably ban spinners as well.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    Have they tried drones yet? There's probably a nice challenge in having to balance weapons weight + battery weight + battery capacity + maneuverability.
    - wtracy 7y ago
      Behold, robot sumo fights: https://youtu.be/4qHe5K3KktY https://youtu.be/4qHe5K3KktY For the most part, nobody is insane enough to battle autonomous robots with destructive weapons on board.
    - michaelt 7y ago
      People have tried such things [1] I would say it doesn't make for particularly good viewing. Every engagement sends one or both drones involved to the ground, which rewards not engaging. Although perhaps more sophisticated rules could improve on that? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFiYqVKFJ0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFiYqVKFJ0U
      - germinalphrase 7y ago
        Obviously, the drones need to learn how to grapple.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    Well, the obvious counter to spinners is nets and loose fibers, or otherwise fouling the spinner's bearings, so it's like banning paper from a rock-paper-scissors tournament. Everybody's gonna throw rock, and the people who still throw scissors because rock is boring get creamed. Ablative spinner shields are too heavy, and get in your way as much as they get in the spinner's way.
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    Spinners won because they were the only thing left that could damage the typical armor, and most robots ended up with self-righting mechanisms to defeat flippers. IIRC good pushers could still compete with spinners though.
drakenot 7y ago
What kind of advances do we need to make for robots of this size to have the kind mobility that people would generally expect?
- saalweachter 7y ago
  About ten years of lowering people's expectations for how mobile a 15-ton robot should be.
- myself248 7y ago
  Financing. MegaBots was founded by a couple of controls engineers who had done the math and figured they could make a real bipedal walking mecha with current technology, if only someone else would fund it. Not that much money materialized, also falling on your face hurts when your face started 15 feet in the air, so the current gen went with a tracked base instead. But the tech can be done, we just need to get the pilots out and the money raised.
  - Animats 7y ago
    There's no market. You can build it, but so far, they don't come. Honda's Asimo. Boston Dynamics's Atlas. Schaft's humanoid (probably the best one to date). Deere's legged logging machine. All never got beyond a few prototypes. None of them work well enough to do anything useful. I used to work on this stuff, back in the 1990s. I have two patents in that area. (The big insight is that legs are for traction control - you can mess with the contact normal in useful ways. As soon as you get off flat terrain, traction control dominates the problem.) I could never see a market for legged machines. Too expensive for toys. Not useful enough for much else. Boston Dynamics has gone from sugar daddy to sugar daddy for decades - first DARPA, then Google, then Softbank. Today, they finally launched a product, their cute little all-electric Spot robot.[1] No price given. [1] https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot
    - kortex 7y ago
      It's still too expensive vs the gained utility. Given a tradeoff of very expensive and finnicky hardware, vs offroad wheels, use animals, or just pay humans, the robot loses. A big part of that cost is the drive train and transmission. You need low speed and tons of torque, so this usually means geardowns. Not that the software NRE costs are trivial, but they can be amortized. But building even a single basic six axis arm with human comparable strength is gonna cost several grand.
rasz 7y ago
>I feel like we peaked with BattleBots nearly 20 years ago Let me introduce you to the present https://www.robomaster.com/en-US https://www.robomaster.com/en-US https://www.twitch.tv/robomaster/videos https://www.twitch.tv/robomaster/videos FPV controlled, computer vision oriented, AI enhanced (gun controllers/target tracking is fully automated).
- magashna 7y ago
  That looks pretty cool, but I definitely have a soft spot for the jank that was in the scene 20 years ago. Back when it was more like pro wrestling
dublinben 7y ago
You might feel that the competitiveness of BattleBots peaked 20 years ago, but combat robots have only continued to get better in the time since. Advancements in battery technology, motors, 3D modeling, and other technologies have made today's combots significantly better than those of your youth.
- XMPPwocky 7y ago
  Better at winning, sure. Better at being interesting to watch, though?
  - xwdv 7y ago
    It’s kind of like how the golden age of warfare was during World War 2. Gritty massive battles with lots of deaths and drama, mixed with a variety of emerging tech and well balanced strength between all opponents. Today’s wars are better, but not as interesting.
    - Consultant32452 7y ago
      Don't worry, the next all out war will be "interesting." Countless drones, extended periods without electricity, global oil supply chains disrupted, it will be very very bad.
      - xwdv 7y ago
        For you. By then I hope to be living entirely off grid in some place nobody gives a fuck about, years behind on current events. It’s only a matter of securing enough money.
giggles_giggles 7y ago
You know BattleBots has been on a new run since 2015? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleBots#Season_6_(2015) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleBots#Season_6_(2015) I cannot vouch for this being high quality TV but the spinning meta was broken somehow. There are still a number of spinners, but other designs do OK (drums, flippers, combinations of these things, even some flamethrower bots). On that note I can vouch for this being highly entertaining low quality TV, and with all the sponsorships and kids you see in the stands, I do hope it's helping to inspire a new generation of roboticists :)
- lahwran 7y ago
  So they invited the public to come watch in a venue in the north bay a year or two ago, an hour ish north of sf, and I went - it was, eh, okay. They wanted the crowd to perform cheering and stuff, it was really more like being an extra. The fights were cool, but it was pretty optimized for being a tv show and not very optimized for being a tv replay of a live show. Shrug, seems fine for what it is, just for what it's worth.
  - wnissen 7y ago
    It sucks for the audience. Sadly RoboGames didn't do a show this year, they are a ton of fun to watch. I hope they come back.
- wnissen 7y ago
  The producers deliberately pick interesting robots (and teams) instead of the most likely to win.
dmix 7y ago
Was there any competition between spinners? It’s be funny if everyone showed up with variations on the spinner because they win. Some of them are just toys to be destroyed by the better bots, many with little strategy. But getting one to work is still an achievement IMO. There’s just going to be a finite pool of talent to produce enough of them. This makes me want to watch a battle again.

nickthegreek 7y ago

ebay link has some shots of the cockpit. https://www.ebay.com/itm/133181448480 https://www.ebay.com/itm/133181448480 15 tons!

eli_gottlieb 7y ago
$50,000, huh? I could liquidate my retirement account to buy a giant robot.
- eschneider 7y ago
  Then use it to rob a bank. Gotta spend money to make money. Seriously though, there's a giant CASE front end loader parked at a construction site right next to a jewelry store on the way home from work. So tempting, but so wrong...
  - madamelic 7y ago
    >giant CASE front end loader Fun fact, apparently most construction equipment use the same keys [1] and the keys can be bought with no proof of ownership. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07J37ZZRC https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07J37ZZRC
    - mikestew 7y ago
      Used to be that the “key” could be a pocket knife in the right hands. They fixed that about 30 or 40 years ago when folks started to figure that out.
    - natmaka 7y ago
      Deviant Ollam showed that some/many US police cars also use the same keys, which also are easy to buy.
Ajedi32 7y ago
There are plenty of videos on their YouTube channel showing how to operate the controls too. It's really fascinating stuff; though I imagine keeping it maintained is a bit of a nightmare.

corodra 7y ago

I'm not trying to be too much of an ass... but is anyone really surprised? The whole thing seemed like a gag from the beginning. Was it really taken seriously? Reading that it has problems with soft dirt is kind of sad too. Plus, it took them $2.5m for just the robot? I hope that's incorrect in the article and those funds include business expenses too. Because that's really bad management... wait, it all makes more sense now.

2muchcoffeeman 7y ago
I’m surprised this was a company. I thought it was some one off build for a bit of fun.
- corodra 7y ago
  Right? I kind of feel like I'm taking crazy pills finding out this was meant as a serious company.
  - madamelic 7y ago
    At least it wasn't VC-funded. Can't wait for the RFS for "giant robots"
- ohazi 7y ago
  Think of it like the company behind a monster truck team. The revenue and (maybe) profit comes from spectator shows / events / competitions against Japan. It definitely wasn't supposed to be "Giant Robot, the startup."
LeifCarrotson 7y ago
As someone extensively familiar with Parker hydraulics and custom machine building (for industrial automation, not fighting robots...), $2.5m is not that bad. I spent about 1/3rd of that to build up a shaker table for heavy equipment, with nothing more than a 120HP electric hydraulic power pack and a pair of 120mm Parker hydraulic actuators, mechanical fabrication, civil engineering, associated servovalves, motion controllers, sensors, PLC/PC controls...etc. That was a static installation, not a vehicle, which costs more. If I had to quote a competitor machine with a well-defined spec - this had none, so you're basically paying for a couple revisions of the design - I'd figure on the order of 1200 hours of mechanical engineering/CAD at $80/hr, 1600 hours of electrical engineering/programming at $100/hr, 2000 hours of skilled fabricator/machinist time at $40/hr, plus project management/purchasing/legal and other overhead, which puts you at close to $1M just in labor. It would be challenging to source the industrial lego that powers this thing for less than $1.5M; I expect that they're charging nothing for some of their labor, using cheaper materials (eg. start with used digger tracks instead of buying something off the shelf) to make this come out as low as $2.5M.

throwaway66920 7y ago

Amused that it is listed as pre owned on eBay

Ajedi32 7y ago
> Seller Notes: “A few dings and dents from engaging in close-quarters nation-on-nation combat for technological supremacy with Japan's most famous giant robot.”

worstestes 7y ago

one of my favorites from their FAQ in the eBay listing: Third, Eagle Prime has a lot of hydraulic hoses and connectors. During the course of operation, it will usually spring a hydraulic leak maybe every 4 hours or so of driving and crushing. So far, every leak we’ve been able to fix with a standard set of large wrenches and a replacement o-ring. I’ll include a bunch

kfarr 7y ago
Another gem: > The giant cannon may or may not work since we used it as a battering ram in the fight with japan, but it should be repairable.

thoughtpalette 7y ago

I do want to say I met Matt Oehrlein at a maker-space in Ferndale, MI before he went on to create MegaBots. The guy is crazy talented with his hands, as well as a super personable and kind person. I'm sure he'll have some more cool and fun endeavors in the future. Will be keeping a lookout for his name!

myself248 7y ago
You should know that makerspace is not bankrupt, actually alive and well after 10 years, and expanding (having signed the lease on the other half of the building, and raising funds to build it out) right now! Come on back for a visit, you'll find a welcoming community and tons of creative stuff going on.
- thoughtpalette 7y ago
  I wish I lived there! Was a really cool space.

excalibur 7y ago

My wife says I can't buy it, sorry guys.

caseysoftware 7y ago
You can get remarried.

Mathnerd314 7y ago

I guess the market is in small robots, e.g. the micromouse competitions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16003683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16003683 YouTube doesn't even like robot fights: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/youtube-robot-combat-videos-animal-cruelty-a9071576.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

bdcravens 7y ago

"So we’re selling the assets of the company to pay back the bank as much as possible, before we file the final bankruptcy paperwork." I thought when bankruptcy is inevitable, you'd want to wait for the final judgment before liquidating.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

Wow, I cannot believe I'm seriously considering bidding on this thing :-).

29athrowaway 7y ago

It would have been better with no humans inside the robots, so the fight could be more violent.

rozab 7y ago
More violent fights would ruin their already-awful profit margin. Since they don't want to smash up the robots anyway, may as well put a human in there
- 29athrowaway 7y ago
  BattleBots is more entertaining to watch. They tried to add some excitement with commentary, but it didn't work.

smokelegend 7y ago

Have you seen the 2019 Atlas... brilliantly scary! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E

ASalazarMX 7y ago
The slight wear on its body makes it look even more impressive.