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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 b

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.

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.