Robots Are Ready to Rumble 

SAN FRANCISCO -- If you happen to be anywhere near the gymnasium at San Francisco State University this weekend and hear a series of very loud crashes or the sound of saw blades cutting violently through metal, it's probably from RoboGames, a gathering of robot-combat enthusiasts from all over the world.

The event kicked off Friday and runs though Sunday. It pits contestants from 12 countries against each other in 46 different categories, including robot soccer, firefighting, sumo, maze solving, triathlon and, of course, combat.

While thousands of people will visit RoboGames and enjoy all the various events, there's no doubt that most people come to watch the battles.

"When you get in there, you get three minutes of total destruction," said John Mladenik, one of three members of Robotic Death Company, whose 220-pound robot Megabyte won the event last year. "Before a fight, I'm so nervous, my hands are shaking."

Mladenik and his teammates, from Escondido, California, brought four robots this year: the 340-pound heavyweight Super Megabyte, Megabyte, a 60-pounder known as Agsma and lightweight 30-pounder Killabyte.

For Mladenik and the others in Robotic Death Company, robot competitions are a year-round passion that takes them all over the country. He said the team has been to competitions in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Minnesota and California, and spent a good deal of money doing so.

For example, he said, Super Megabyte and Megabyte cost $11,000 to build, and all told, the team coughs up at least $1,000 a month to keep its machines up and running.

RoboGames is the second iteration of what used to be known as Robolympics. Event organizer Simone Davalos said the U.S. Olympic Committee told her and colleague David Calkins that they couldn't use the words "Olympics" or "Olympiad" in the United States. But Davalos said RoboGames is the U.S. representative to the International Robot Olympiad.

On Friday, with hundreds of spectators in attendance, the robot battles were fast and furious. From anywhere in the gymnasium, the constant sounds of crashing robots could be heard, often accompanied by the acrid smell of smoking robot guts. Robots large and small dominated the room, many looking like boxes with large protruding blades, while others looked like dollies decked out for fighting.

Roy Hellen, RoboGames' master of ceremonies and the only one in the gymnasium in an armored knight's outfit, said a big part of the event's appeal is getting to see old friends and the new designs they've come up with.

"It's kind of like a homecoming," Hellen said. "These people haven't seen each other in a year."

Many of the competitors have faced off countless times at any number of robot events and are well-versed in each other's combat strategies and the other robots' special attributes. Yet they acknowledge that no matter how much skill is involved in robot battling, winning is sometimes the luck of the draw.

"It really is rock, scissors, paper," said Mladenik. "There's no one guy who can beat everyone.... Sometimes it's the luck of the pairings, where you're the rock, and they're the scissors."

Still, Mladenik said skill is definitely a factor. He said there are generally two ways to win a robot battle: You can destroy the other robot, or you can control it, which takes driving skills.

Stephen Felk, who worked on a robot for six weeks only to run out of time before the competition, said driving skill is so important that often the winners are "guys with simple boxes (who) just drive rings around the other guy."

But Felk also said winning requires an obsessive attention to detail.

"That machine has to be 100 percent," he said. "If there's one screw loose, it's going to get found out."

Further, said Mladenik, winning the entire competition, which means winning five battles, requires constant maintenance. "You may win one," he said, "but if you can't maintain it, you can't win five fights."

Losing, too, brings its rewards, Mladenik said. "When we lose, we find out what went wrong, and fix it," he said.

He said Robotic Death Company recently retrofitted Megabyte specifically to out-battle another robot that had beaten it twice in other competitions. He wouldn't say how the team members changed the machine, however, only that they had attempted to offset the chief advantage the robot's nemesis had employed in beating it previously.

Meanwhile, one byproduct of the constant battles requires the presence of a medical team.

"The real hazard is that after the robots are done fighting, they're damaged," said Joseph Pred of Mars Medical. "The operators can injure themselves on sharp surfaces that weren't there before."

Indeed, many of the robots emerged from the bulletproof-glass-enclosed arena looking like they'd been through some sort of natural disaster, with huge gashes and bent metal everywhere.

In any case, despite the highly charged competitive nature of the event, most people involved are open to any and all newcomers.

"You never know what people are going to bring out," said Hellen. "If you have a robot, you're welcome to come."

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