What Happened to Robot Wars?

The creator of Battle Bots, Trey, sued Budwiser when they came out with a Battle Bot-esque commercial. Budwiser was a big sponsor of Comedy Central, the network that Battle Bots was on.

Load pistol Aim at foot Fire

Hmmm...not good.

Are there any plans for web casts, tapes, DVDs...anything....I thought it was a good thing.

Especially the discussi> The creator of Battle Bots, Trey, sued Budwiser when they came out with a

I did too. It was a sign for me the industry was about to wake up and fulfill it's long awaited promise. The demise of those shows really looked to spell another period of hybernation, and I really dread that. The previous spike was in the early-mid 1980's with the Hero's and Androbots, etc. Of course my long standed and loudly proclaimed assertion was it was DARPA that really helped put the community to sleep by draining off about half a billion in resources that would have been better left in the hands of the entrepreneurs. But there I go again, with my Adam Smith inspired thinking.

We had three of four of those kinds of programs. Battlebots was the original. Robot Wars was the British version iirc.

-- Randy M. Dumse

Caution: Objects in mirror are more confused than they appear.

What industry -- dangerous RC vehicles? I do think the shows were good for the RC hobby, but I don't see that they had very much benefit to the robotics hobby. I don't want to start a religious war, but really, I can think of more ways they did harm than good:

- They gave millions of people the idea that a remote-controlled vehicle is a robot. (Unless it happens to look like a car, I suppose.)

- They gave millions of people the idea that robots (since they think that's what these are) are violent, destructive, and dangerous.

- They inspired hundreds or thousands of kids to play with dangerous weapons in an effort to build their own violent machines. (I wonder if there are any reliable statistics on how many injuries occurred as a result?)

- They caused Servo magazine to waste a good quarter of its pages on content of fairly little value to hobby robotics (an unfortunate result that continues to this day).

- If any girls with a budding interest in robotics watched one of these shows, they probably gave it up, as these shows were disgustingly male-oriented. (My wife certainly had no patience for them, and she's a computer science professor.)

I agree about the 80s spike, but I think we're entering a real golden age now. Commercial robots like Roomba and Robosapien have been dramatically more successful than anything in the past; robotic toys (like TMX Elmo, and various dogs and Santas and whatnot with speaker-independent speech recognition) are getting more sophisticated; and the Robo-One events in Japan are becoming extremely popular there, and starting to catch on here too. I think we're going to see more advancement in the robotics hobby in the next decade than we saw in the last two decades combined. Exciting times!

Best,

- Joe

What industry?

H-bridges for one. You can buy a fairly robust 100A (or even a 400A) H-bridge now, at a smidgeon of their previous costs. That is a big advance, and it came from the robot wars.

Then there are issues about available motors and ESC's and batteries and other control elements. Many lessons about reliability, durableness, survivability, etc., were advanced.

Frankly, I doubt it gave millions the idea a remote-controlled vehicle is a robot. I agree that largely they were remote-controlled vehicle. I just doubt the millions could tell the difference where the control was coming from.

Besides, think about where other forms of automation started. Take guided missles. They started out as AA guns, which were completely RC projectiles (up to the point of lanch at least), all done manually. Soon the range settings came off the radar. Shortly after that the hand controls were integrated with the radar. Radio Proximity fuses were added to the projectiles, giving them some autonomy in their task. Then the radars were integrated into the projectile, fins and motors added, and adjustments were made in flight... and so on. The same trend existed in the robot warriors. More and more of the control was being integrated. It was only a matter of time until the "John Henry" point would have been reached, and the best systems would become completely autonomous.

There are many insurgents who would now agree.

Do you have any idea how popular NASCAR is? There are plenty of statistics about teenage drivers and their death rates. Blood lust in sports is a human drive, long predating robot wars. Better robots than gladiators, I'd say.

There are considerable statistics about how many lives are being saved in combat by freeing EOD specialists from getting their limbs/heads blown off. At least on our side because we've got the technology to use them.

I'm sure she watches shows that I wouldn't. Does that mean those shows are bad? Or are you just pointing out men and women have different interests? Sports viewing and participation being a very large one.

I hope you're right. I have a financially vested position in the explosiong. Lately I've been feeling I was woefully self-mislead. Forums such as these are getting quieter and quieter.

-- Randy M. Dumse

Caution: Objects in mirror are more confused than they appear.

[snip]

Joe:

The Combat Zone section of Servo is relatively new, circa May

2006. For a relatively small hobby such as amateur robotics, it is challenging to find enough content fill a monthly magazine without getting repeatative. (Servo is not the US magazine to attempt to cover the hobbyist robotics space.) I suspect that a number of combat robot enthusiasts approached the editors of Servo and said that they could generate a monthly stream of articles. I must confess that the articles in the Combat Zone bore me to tears, but that just shows what my robot biases are.

The bottom line is that members of this community are the ones who need to write the articles to fill the pages of Servo. I will also mention that the Servo editors actually pay for content. Writing up your initial exploits into robotics is fair game and can help pay for the the next crop of robots.

When the next crop of RoboBricks2 modules mature, I can assure everyone that Bill Benson and I will submit another crop of articles to Servo.

The more articles we submit to Servo, the more we can learn from one another.

My $.02,

-Wayne

Oops, I hadn't realized that -- I only started my subscription last fall.

Me too. :) But I do recognize that others may have different biases.

I'm working on it! One's initial exploits can be amazingly dull (at least, to anyone else), but I do have a couple of ideas in the pipeline that may make decent articles.

I look forward to that.

Yes (though I'll give Robot a fair chance, too). Thanks for pointing this out.

Best,

- Joe

No, I'm pointing out that these shows did a disservice to the robotics hobby by driving women away. Some of those women may have been great contributors to the field, maybe a real-life Susan Calvin -- but with these shows portraying robotics as a testosterone-laden, violent, silly pursuit in which women mostly participate by appearing in scanty clothing, they turned their brilliance to other endeavors.

Was that necessary? Would a show about robotics that didn't involve scantily clad women and truck-show-style theatrics not be entertaining? If so, I think we should pick a different hobby.

You may be feeling the slow decline of Usenet in general. Most of the young'uns wouldn't know a newsreader from a hole in their hard drive -- they're all about web forums and blogs nowadays. Personally, I don't think those forms of communication are nearly as convenient as newsgroups, but that's a battle that's already been lost. Only old die-hards like us still hang out here. :)

Best,

- Joe

Maybe not as a regular column -- they shift from time to time -- but the first editor of the magazine, Dan Danknick, is from the combot field, and he very much shaped the magazine to include coverage of it. However, IMO, by-in-large many of the players in robot combat are not always interesting in sharing their insights. They're there to win, after all. But it's a changed business, as like some of the early pioneers have done (like Grant Imahara, Pete Miles, Tom Carroll, and several others who have written books) they're turning their attention to showing others how it's done.

Excellent! Can't wait for them.

-- Gordon

The "sport" tends to be male-oriented, which I think is to be expected.

But I'm not so sure it has changed women's involvement with robotics as a science. If anything, I see more women in robotics than ever, though they may not get as much press. Example is Cynthia Breazeal of MIT, one of the most famous faces of robotics, though hardly a household name. Her field of interest is human-machine interaction, with a decided emphasis *against* the violent! Part of this disparity is PR; everyone remembers Rod Brooks and Cog, but Breazeal was heavily involved with Cog, Kismet, and others. The other part is that human-machine interaction doesn't exactly burn up Slashdot's servers.

In my own experience there are fewer and fewer people interested in going out to their garage, and cutting and hammering together a robot. Pre 1995 or so, this is what everyone had to do to get into the field. There were few females interested in the whole scope of robotics. Now with less emphasis on the physical construction -- we have a cultural bias not related to combat robotics that says putting hardware together is guys' stuff -- I've seen more and more female participation, not less.

I do agree that the showmanship of the TV shows could be sexist, but I don't think it affected women's interest in robotics, if they already had that interest. I think they tended not to tune in to begin with.

-- Gordon

Other way around: Battlebots was an offshoot of Robot Wars. The British TV version was licensed from the American originators of Robot Wars.

Don't see this at all. These are basically heavy-duty RC cars, with golfcar-like high-amperage DC controllers. How did taking existing components, putting them into a small vehicle, and calling it a "robot" answer some promise? Did it prove anything beyond the obvious that for things like warfare or urban control you'd need a low-slung, heavy, metal base with protected wheels and maybe even an invertible design?

Short term interest maybe, but promise? Seems to me competitions like Micromouse and various robot sumo and soccer tournaments are FAR more reflective of the promise of robotics. But they're not as exciting, so they don't get mainstream television distribution (here in the US at least; Japan is another story -- and yes, the Japanese kick our butts when it comes to the robotics industry).

Don't get me wrong: I'm not against robot combat, and some of the shows were interesting to watch. But I have exactly the opposite view as you: they took people and their money *away* from real robotics. Like LEGO Mindstorms when it came out in the late 90s, there was a momentary flurry of activity, then the public's interest moved on. Like it always does. The lack of the shows on TV means people want to see Donald Trump fire someone. It doesn't mean robotics is crawling back into some hole, because that analogy doesn't exist in the first place.

As a field, robotics just hums along, with occasional spurts of

*interest* from the general public. The regular, predictable activity is where's it's always been.

-- Gordon

It's possible that, as you suggest, the shows didn't do very much harm in this regard, but they clearly didn't help. Compare this to the Japanese robot competitions, which are also mostly male-dominated (as is Japanese society in general) -- but does get some women participants, and seems to encourage this with such things as female judges and the "demo" round where you can show off your robot in whatever way you want (and female participants have done some of the most creative demos). Girls (and there are always quite a few in the audience too) can see such things and say, "I could do that too."

It's quite likely I'm over sensitive on this issue because of my wife's connection to computer science and engineering. They have a constant struggle to get girls to enter the field and stay in it, even though (as you pointed out) there are some luminary role models for them.

True, there will always be girls who are passionate about a particular field enough to damn the torpedos (and the old boys' club) and forge ahead. And there are those who have no interest in it whatsoever. But what's worrisome is the fate of the girls who are on the fence -- they have interest and ability in engineering, but fear an uphill struggle in a heavily male-dominated field. Those are the girls whose talents may be lost to us by boorish displays of testosterone.

Best,

- Joe

blueeyedpop wrote:

--Aha! A new conspiracy theory! IIRC Trey thot the commercial was a hoot and there was no lawsuit but I could be wrong. --One thing that *did* happen was the lawsuit when the d*****ad weasel who "owns" Robot Wars sued Trey and Battlebots, claiming that RW was due a royalty every time BB had a skirmish. That lawsuit included a gag order from the judge so that Trey couldn't even talk about it on the website and, in fact, the website wasn't allowed to post any updates for almost two years. By the time the lawsuit was settled no network would touch BB with a ten foot pole, even though they *won* the lawsuit! The last network to host the show was Comedy Central, but after they started adding the bimbos the parents of the team members protested and BB, which is really a federation of teams, rather than a game show like RW, wouldn't accept further offers from CC to air the fights. --Nowadays all the indy stations on cable and satellite TV are owned by one of the Big Three, so no matter who BB could contact the fix is in; i.e. there are no more stations available to host the fights. Crummy situation all around. When the last BB tourney happened a few years back there were over 600 machines registered and maybe 200 to 300 teams in the world who were eager to compete. Nowadays there are less than a handful and I have this dreadful feeling that all the ex teams are now majoring in law instead of engineering. It's a nightmare I have...

even though (as

The real struggle for the engineering and computer science disciplines is the outshoring of jobs...these disciplines need to address this serious problem since it has cost the professions millions of jobs. This has also not been lost upon students who have seen their parents and neighbors seriously affected by offshoring who then choose careers in fields other than engineering and science.

If you want students to enter a discipline, incomes and job opportunities need to be adequate for the risk and effort expended to enter the field.

TMT

Joe Strout wrote:

I don't know about that... I'm a software engineer, and my wife's a computer scientist, and we certainly don't feel any pain from this problem. I have more work than I can handle, and I know a lot of managers and CEOs who are always looking to hire talented local engineers, and have a hard time finding them. Good engineers can just about name their price. I don't see any shortage of jobs; I see a shortage of talent.

Well, students do a lot of stupid things. :) It could be that they have a *perception* of such a problem, as you do, and that this would impact enrollment even if the problem is not real.

Best,

- Joe

"...*perception* of such a problem..." ???

It is a well known REAL problem....and declining enrollments indicate that it is here to stay as witnessed by the mass engineering and computer science layoffs of the recent years.

If you really followed the professions you would know about the declining engineering and comp sci enrollment numbers ...and stagnant and declining wages.

and have >a hard time finding them. "

LOL...you mean they are finding it hard to hire at the third world wages that they want to offer.

Yeah right.

The talent is there...or should I say it was. You don't layoff thousands of professionals with decades of experience and then expect to find that same experience when you decide you need it again...it has left the building.... for good as the saying goes.

Industry is getting the same it has given.

Sorry Joe but you sound alot like a headhunter.

TMT

Joe Strout wrote:

snipped-for-privacy@NOrobotoidSPAM.com (Gordon McComb) wrote in :

With all due respect Gordon, The community doesn't seem to mind calling the bomb squad's heavy-duty RC "Car" with a few neat attachments, a ROBOT.

I really dont think you guys are giving the BB guys due credit. I found it totally facinating reading some of the memoirs of the builders, talking about the progression of their "ROBOTS"

Many robot hobbist "slap together ready made parts out of a box"

I think each and every one of them enrich the hobby.

Besides .. there is no such thing as bad publicity, anything that brings attention to robots .. is good.

just my thoughts Mike

No, I don't believe it is. I'm well connected to several relevant communities:

- Tech business (I run an internet company myself, and belong to a group of technology CEOs, all of whom report a hard time finding qualified local engineers)

- Software consulting business (I do some consulting on the side and know quite a few other consultants in the U.S., and we all have more work than we can handle most of the time)

- Computer science education (of which my wife is a professor, as previously mentioned, and has observed that qualified graduates have no problems findinga job).

All the contacts I have in these communities agree that outsourcing has NOT caused any lack of jobs, and indeed, there are more good jobs currently than there are good candidates. My brother-in-law (who happens to be visiting for the holidays, so I asked him about this) was recently trying to hire a couple of programmers in San Diego, and it took them months to find decent people. Half the candidates he talked to couldn't even explain a hash.

In fact, the common thread I see and hear is that the "generation Y" kids coming out of school these days tend to lack motivation and (no doubt as a result) skill. I don't know why that is -- but it may well be exactly BECAUSE there are so many jobs seeking candidates, that even with mediocre skills you can probably find something. So they're not motivated to work very hard and actually learn their trade. But this part is just speculation on my part.

Yes, enrollment is a problem, which of course is another part of the reason why it's so hard to find good engineers. This declining enrollment is not justified by the job market, however. Why the students are not choosing to go into engineering is an open question, and probably has a lot of answers.

For example, a lot more students are going into forensic science, and this is linked directly to the popular "CSI" TV show and its spin-offs... maybe engineering just isn't as cool these days as forensics or business.

Or it could be that they're buying into the "oh no, outsourcing!" fear that some folks spread around.

You seem to be laboring under a misconception -- I not only follow the professions, I'm heavily involved in them. I've explained the basis of my position; what's the basis of yours?

Like $65K/year (at which price, an employer I know ended up settling for someone who doesn't even know how to debug)?

Yes, right. I'm not making this stuff up.

And done what, do you suppose? Gone into retirement? Become a greeter at Wal-Mart? No. My town has a major HP facility, which restructured a few years ago and ended up laying off a lot of engineers. I know a lot of those guys; they're not sitting on their thumbs. They've found other work, or in many cases, decided to start their own businesses (and many of them are now struggling to hire young talent).

I'm not currently, but I expect to be hiring in a year or so. I also expect to have to go to great lengths to find and woo talented engineers, based on the experience of my peers at the same process.

Best,

- Joe

Ah, and so the argument usually comes down to this: who are the "real" robot builders. My message avoided that, though IMO combat robots are not true robots, while many of the bomb-squad and front-line robots are, because they often incorporate many autonomous functions and sensors that relieve the human operator of having to control every aspect of the vehicle.

But I did say combat robotics in no way fulfilled a "promise" especially in light of lesser machines such as a mini-sumo, which may not be destroyed in a hail of sparks, and certainly isn't as sexy. But it is a "robot" requiring programming, adequate sensors, and ample construction. Yet I haven't read anyone saying mini-sumo offered some promise in the field. IMO I think it's important to separate flash from substance, and I suggested Randy fell victim to the glitz, mistaking the momentary rush of general public interest with the real science that actual propels the field.

-- Gordon