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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's very nice. They finally got a more general control model. That's progress. The first flip from that crowd was two decades ago. Now they have a way of generating and following more complex motions. "80% success", they write, so there's a ways to go yet.
I wonder what they use for actuators. What you want for running and gymnastics is a spring with adjustable spring constant, zero point, and damping. A pneumatic cylinder can do that, and can store energy briefly between motions. Humans, when running, recover about 60%-70% of energy from stride to stride. (Cheetahs, 90%. That's how they run so fast.) Hydraulics can't do that very well, although there have been some attempts with hydraulic accumulators. There have been attempts to do this mechanically, with two motors and a spring, but they're bulky. Direct drive electric motors can do it, but if you have a gear train, the inertia of the motor is multiplied by the reduction ratio and you lose the ability to absorb shock loads. Also tend to break gear teeth. ("You cannot strip the teeth of a magnetic field" - early electric locomotive selling point.) I once thought that direct drive linear motors [1] were going to be the answer, but those never got popular. (Aura, the main company in that field, had some nice technology and a big financial scandal. Their web site looks like a placeholder now. It's one of those areas where hard problem + limited demand -> no products.)
There's a hack called a 'series elastic actuator', which is a powered screw jack with a stiff spring on the end, used to fake more general springs. When absorbing energy, the motor runs fast to back off the screw jack and unload the stiff spring. This recovers no energy; it uses power when absorbing energy. It's used in research robots where battery life isn't an issue.
It took Boston Dynamics about $120 million to get to the "legged squad support system", the militarized Big Dog. No idea how much it took to get to a usable Atlas.
It's good that they're still trying. The question is how much patience and money Softbank has left.
I wish Schaft had made it. They were a University of Tokyo spinoff, bought by Google and dumped by Google. They used small liquid-cooled motors, so they could run the motors much harder than usually done. Like Tesla's motors, but far smaller.
That thing is nightmare fuel. What kind of power in voltage/amps is it on? With fusion technology, the iron man fuel cell will pretty much actually exist. Think about how much more capable these things would be with higher energies..
Materials science so that they can be built from composites and weigh 1/10th of their current mass, and also take some hits.
Otherwise it requires ridiculous amounts of energy to get any kind of real velocity in the movements, and then the first impact would explode both robots.
I would say that you're barking up the wrong tree. It's really about cost of investment vs return on investment. 15 tonne robots still cost too much to build, transport, run, etc. Therefore, they have no competitors, because everybody else did the same napkin math but realized it wouldn't work.
That's not to say that something like this isn't possible, the size simply needs to be reduced. Remove the human from the inside and then your robots can also deal proper blows.
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.
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.
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.
Have they tried drones yet? There's probably a nice challenge in having to balance weapons weight + battery weight + battery capacity + maneuverability.
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?
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.
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.
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."
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!
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.
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
> 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.”
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.
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...
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
