Robot Combat League: Training Us for the Future
American Gladiators and Robot Wars had a baby. It’s called Robot Combat League.
Syfy’s latest offering has a simple premise: twelve robots enter, one robot leaves.
Robot designer Mark Setrakian developed twelve hulking humanoid robots, all equipped for hand-to-hand combat. Each robot has two human handlers—the robo-tech who controls its feet and mobility, and the robo-jockey who wears an exo-suit and controls punches and blocks, not unlike playing the Wii.
This is BattleBots on steroids. The rabid Roombas that rammed into each other on previous TV shows seem fluffy and adorable by comparison.
The robots run on hydraulic fluid delivered via a steel alloy T bar, which services as the “bloodline” and helps them balance. The bar supplies up to 2,000 pounds of hydraulic pressure, which enables the robot to fight and delivers enough juice to allow for some impressive spraying when the robots get “injured.”
The 24 human competitors include robot developers, professional athletes, gamers, MMA fighters (one of whom is George Lucas’s daughter), engineers, scientists, a toy designer, a software manager, and a superhero impersonator. The winning pair receives $100,000—and, of course, glory.
“You’re all about to become superhuman,” host Chris Jericho tells them as they enter the arena to meet their robots, who are named in true gladiatorial tradition: Robo-Hammer, Drone Strike, Steel Cyclone, Axe, Steampunk, Medieval, Scorpio, Crash, Commander, Game Over, Brimstone, and Thunder Skull.
The robots have various strengths and weaknesses—Axe has laser eyes and a face shaped like a cleaver, Crash has a cage that covers its body, Medieval has hands shaped like morning stars, etc. They vary in height, weight, and range of arm movement, but they’re all “so powerful and so dangerous that if you were standing in the middle of the ring it would be like standing in the middle of a car crash,” Setrakian says.
The teams compete for ranking by racing to hit a target on a practice foe-bot. Some teams—all but one of which have been randomly paired—seem more natural than others; the teamwork aspect is crucial, as the robots’ arms and legs need to be synched in order to fight effectively.
The first bout features the top ranked team, a robotics entrepreneur and an Olympic athlete, driving Steel Cyclone. The underdogs, driving Crash, are a father-daughter pair who both work as engineers at Intel.
The trash talk before the fight preserves a human element. Robots will truly be equal to humans when they can throw down the gauntlet by way of taunts and verbal chest-pounding.
The fight consists of three two-minute rounds. Three judges keep score; each hit to a vital part earns a point. Each team has a pit crew and 20 minutes to make any necessary repairs. If a robot can’t make the bell for the next round, or the judges deem it too injured to continue, the match is over.
The match starts off dramatically—Cyclone loses its foot, but rains blows down upon Crash that result in a shower of sparks and cheers from spectators who scream like wrestling fans, but are better dressed.
The first round is as hard to watch as a lopsided boxing match. Steel Cyclone dominates while Crash’s robo-jockey flails away, clearly frustrated that her dad can’t quite coordinate Crash’s footwork with her punches. Toward the end of the first round, Steel Cyclone lands a blow on Crash’s left shoulder that dislodges the cage, exposing the actuator, the robot equivalent of a muscle. Steel Cyclone aims right for that vulnerable spot until hydraulic fluid spurts like blood, eliciting cheers.
Despite being over seven feet tall and close to 1,000 pounds, the robots are surprisingly fragile. Sure, they can knock the crap (or cables) out of each other, but they have soft spots, vulnerabilities, places that yield quickly to force. They can go from invincible to incapacitated in seconds—just like humans.
After twenty dramatic minutes of pit repair time, Crash re-enters the ring. There’s a great moment when the two simultaneously whale on one another, bathing in each other’s sparks. I won’t spoil the ending, but if you’ve ever seen a television show (or a boxing match) before, you can guess what happens. The losers take the head of their defunct robot as a souvenir.
P.W. Singer, a specialist on 21st century warfare, says in his TED Talk that “Mankind’s 5,000 year monopoly on the fighting of war is breaking down in our very lifetime,” referring to the rapidly increasing prominence of robots in war. Robot Combat League isn’t war—yet—but it makes the leap from drones to humanoid combat robots. The fighting becomes more real, more human; the robots are boxers with gears. RCL is a proving ground for robotic infantries, as well as a means of conditioning viewers for a future in which this kind of fighting will happen on a mass scale.
The robots in RCL manifest the movements and intentions of the humans that drive them, which is a long way from the robot uprising feared by many and studied by some. But the show also starts to prepare us for the evolution of robots. Now, human-controlled robots fight. Soon, autonomous robots will fight each other—and we’ll almost certainly be watching; perhaps these bouts will become the new cockfights. If so, will the robots, as they do in so many sci-fi stories, call bullshit and bring the fight to us? And can anything, televised or not, possibly prepare us for that?
Read the Could This Happen post on robots and war
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