If you’re too young to remember Battlebots on the television, there are two things that you should know. First is that there are plenty of highlights of this epic robot battle royale on YouTube, and the second is that now there’s an even better version with drones instead of robots merely confined to land. It’s called DroneClash 2019, and it looks like it was amazing.
Not only were the robots set up in a box and asked to battle each other, they first had to navigate down a corridor with anti-drone measures. The drones have to make it through and into a battle royale in the final room. If this wasn’t good enough, the event was opened by a prince of the Netherlands and is put on by a university.
This is an annual event to push the state of the art in drone and anti-drone tech, but we’d be happy to see it optioned for a TV show. If it doesn’t, you might be satisfied with a giant human-driven robot competition from a while back, or maybe just head down the rabbit hole of old Battlebots clips.
Battlebots is alive and well
Umm, isn’t BattleBots back?
Yes! The fourth season of revitalized Battlebots begins in the US on June 7 on Discovery and the Science Channel.
Over produced and dull. The tip off are the flames built into the set. They needed to do something to make it look exciting.
It’s worth noting that it’s an academic exercise put on by a university research dept. They’re having a bit of fun with the production values. Everything is better with flames.
Still, the Tesla coil is reported to have slowly damaged some of the entrants.
Pushing “state of the art” is like that. Now all they need is some laser equipped sharks firing at the drones.
They used to have flames in “Robot Wars” (I gather that’s the UK version of Battlebots) which were certainly pointless. One of the show’s own robots even had a flame thrower built into it, but… there were no paper robots.
On the other hand I can imagine a burst of flame rising from the floor could disrupt a flying robot.
Ahem *Diotior* Cough *Fur*
Even that was just the fur that burned though, wasn’t it? It wasn’t actually harmed by that.
The video is nearly worthless with clips so short you can’t tell what’s happening. This one is better – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySwq7dRD8NA