‘Bots High’ Brings Back the Battle Bots

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The 120-pound robots charged each other, and as they crashed the sound of grinding metal echoed through the arena. Spinning discs of a bot dubbed “Witch Doctor” buzzed as they tore off the front of the other bot, “Grasshopper,” sending a large metal wedge flying into the air.

Witch Doctor waited while Grasshopper charged, only to again meet the buzzing discs that sent it soaring upward where it smashed against the clear walls of the arena. A cheering crowd stood outside the walls of the small arena, and even while the bots are tossed, torn, and smashed, there is surprising good sportsmanship among the high school teams.

“Lately the ones that have won are the ones that have these very fast spinning disk,” said documentary filmmaker Joey Daoud, who captured the battle bot match in his new documentary, Bots High.

“I hope that with the film, more people can see it and realize that there are programs like this out there, and it may inspire them to get involved with robotics and other programs,” Daoud said in a phone interview.

There used to be a popular TV show about the contests, Battle Bots, but when the show went off the air, public attention also waned. But the matches are far from over, and have carried on in school gymnasiums throughout the country, where young minds have carried the torch of arena robot combat.

Daoud said that after Battle Bots stopped, “I thought robot fighting ended.” Yet during his last year in college he came across a newspaper clipping for a high school battle bot championship in Miami.

“I thought it was fascinating that not only was this still happening, but that it was high school and college kids building these robots that were really intense and big—and just as good as the professional robots,” Daoud said.

The contest stuck with him, and after graduating Daoud decided to peruse the battle bot contests as his first full-length film. What he wanted to show, however, was less about the matches, and more about the people behind them.

“The show [Battle Bots] just showed the battles. It never showed what really went into making the robots, so I thought that was an interesting story,” he said.

For the film, Daoud followed three teams for a year, leading up to the national competition, and found some very unique characters. “So it’s high school life, and they build robots,” he said.

The description of the film’s heroes as “genius inventor Will, who constructs seemingly indestructible bots that unfortunately self-destruct (sometimes in a cloud of smoke and flames), and My Mechanical Romance, a team of Catholic school girls who stand out amid male bot participants with a combination of beauty, brains, and fashion sense.”

Daoud notes that Will, who is the son of an engineer, “has a massive machine shop in his house where he grew up and just has unlimited resources available to him. He just makes crazy things, and is sort of the high-end anomaly of genius robot builder.”

But the others have to take a more home-grown approach to the art of robot combat—using rented robot-building spaces and classroom robot labs, although all three teams tend to also work on the bots last minute, tinkering away on the sidelines before their matches.

Next...The Robot Arena

The Robot Arena

The technology of the robot contests has changed a lot since the days of Battle Bots. Technology has gotten smaller and less expensive, which makes it easier to build heavy, weaponized robots while staying within the 120 pound weight limit; and even the high school kids now have access to advanced 3-D design and prototyping software that lets them test and model their bots in digital environments before setting them loose.

Social networking plays a large role. Students would build their 3-D models, post them to Facebook, and ask other students for feedback and ideas.

Rules have also changed quite a bit. Wedges used to be all the rage in robot weaponry—basically just angles used to push other bots around the arena—but “wedges are super boring to watch,” said Daoud, and so “now they’re making requirements that you have to have an active weapon.”

There are only a few limitations with weapons—no projectiles and no flame throwers. Although Daoud notes, “There are some other, different robot competitions where I believe do allow flame throwers.”

But, the nature of robot battles is, as one student told Daoud, “just like ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors,’ where one weapon is good against one type of robot, but that same type of weapon is terrible against a different one.”

There is a book of robot weapons, which students tend to not venture too far from. Most of the different concepts appear in the competitions—with the exception of the multi-bot, which is a robot inside a robot.

“So you can make a robot, then have another robot inside it that would come out, and then you'd have two robots against one—as long as your two robots weigh under 120 pounds,” Daoud said. “I’ve never actually seen anyone do that, but everyone always talks about it.”

Aside from the battles, however, there is surprisingly good sportsmanship among the teams. “In the pit area it’s very friendly and very open,” Daoud said, noting that students will even open their bots and show other teams how they work—which is comparable to a football coach showing his playbook to a rival team.

The main point of the contest is also not about robot carnage. The idea is to bring interest to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education—an area where the U.S. schools are lagging behind the rest of the world.

The bots help make STEM education “more meaningful and fun,” said Daoud, adding that “Just the amount of skill they use and learn is amazing.”

The documentary also raises an idea of what kids can accomplish when they are given the right tools and facilities. “I don’t know what you‘d see if you gave kids the opportunities and the tools to create things … they’re given the opportunity to go beyond what you’d think you would expect of someone in high school,” he said.

“I wish I knew this was around when I was in High School,” he added. “I would have totally built robots.”