Given just a few hours’ notice, competitors fill the pits alongside the studio with a flurry of activity: tools, parts, and scary-looking chassis everywhere while teams make adjustments, hoping their offensive capabilities will defeat all comers. Perhaps the real challenge is that until show night, competitors have no idea whom-or what-they’re fighting. “Things can add up, and small problems can become big problems,” he says. Participation in BattleBots, according to Rose, is an intense period of little sleep and high pressure, making sure the robot is ready right when the network says it needs to be ready. Aside from flippers like Bronco, there are smashers, spinners, choppers with swinging blades, and plenty of other nasty designs.
#Bronco battlebots pro
Like pro boxing, BattleBots has a range of weight classes other than that, competitors are pretty free to include any weapons they wish. The final designed and built Bronco is the result of a whole lot of passion and money-and the right 3D-design software: Autodesk Fusion 360 and Inventor assisted in concept and design, and HSMWorks drove the tools for machined parts. The current team includes lead parts machinist Chris Daniel, CAD engineers Greg Staples and Brad Sykes, electronics engineer and builder Nolan Van Dine, and logic-board engineer Matteo Borri. Today, Inertia Labs includes likeminded friends and coworkers who, Rose says, all bring different skills to the table. Courtesy Drew Turney.īradley still runs the machine shop they established for that first BattleBots more than a decade ago.
“There are few things that combine this level of technology, building, and destruction without any humans actually getting hurt,” Rose says. Robot Wars eventually sank under the weight of what Bradley calls being “mired in lawsuits,” but two of the original competitors went on to found BattleBots, and Rose, Bradley, and their teams stayed in the scene. In fact, Inertia Labs earned its first victory thanks to a fire-suppression gas used to choke off the opponent’s engine. It was a different world then, with a lot more internal-combustion bots (including one called Blendo, created by Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame) and now-illegal gas weapons. After Bradley went on to be a machinist and Rose studied industrial design, they knew they were the perfect team for the robot-fighting tournament Robot Wars, back in the mid-’90s.Īfter performing the worst in their Robot Wars class, the guys kept at it, gradually gaining some success. While growing up in Sausalito, California, near an old shipyard that Rose describes as “basically a junkyard,” he and Bradley were always building stuff. Looking like a cross between a tank and a machine press that’s been possessed by an evil spirit, Bronco is a flipper: It jabs a pneumatic arm the length of its entire body underneath its prey and viciously flips the enemy high into the air, inflicting damage through the impact of a long drop.īronco is no doubt a worthy opponent, as Rose and Bradley have had many years to perfect their robotic creations.
Their brutal-looking creation, Bronco, is one of this year’s competitors on the mechanical-gladiator stage. Ushering in some of that cool are Alexander Rose and Reason Bradley, the brain trust behind Inertia Labs. Inertia Labs’ Alexander Rose (left) and Reason Bradley. Courtesy BattleBots Inc. You’ve seen them in the movies, but real robots that fight in a real arena are magnitudes of order cooler-as the BattleBots Season 2 audience can attest. The answer will be anything from sharks and Darth Vader to dinosaurs and LEGO, but “fighting robots” will inevitably come up, too.
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