u/Jamez2021

There are only three Horizontals with a chance to win a group in the pro league.

Bloodsport needs to beat Huge in a quick KO. Then Minotaur must loose to Hypershock to have a chance of winning the group of death.

Calypso must beat Magnitude, then Disarray has to beat MadCatter to make the next round.

Malice must beat Golden Fury to win the group.

I personally think there is a 15-20% chance. I think both Calypso and Malice are at a disadvantage against their respective opponents and so are the bots that the horizontals need to win (Disarray and Hypershock). I think there is a good chance that one of these bots makes the next round as an at large bid, but I don’t see any of these bots winning their group unfortunately. I think Bloodsport is the most likely to get an at large bid but Malice is a very close second.

Between Blip and Biohazard I think it would go down to which bot can win the ground game. In the ground game I think it’s pretty even. Blip with its forks has the edge in the ground game in theory. However, Blip has to get more of Biohazard off the ground for a flip due to the flipper being behind the front wedge. All Biohazard needs is to get the very front of the bot under Blip to get a flip. What do you guys think?

Both Orbitron and Bloodsport land a massive hit on each other. Both bots are now flipped upside down after receiving damage. Which robot is more likely to get back on its wheels?

With Pro League underway, I wanted to have some fun and make my own group of death. Each robot in this group has a win rate greater than 70%.

The web page for Pro League is back online and there are a few additional details that are interesting. It confirms that Pro League will be back next year and is accepting applicants. The web page also showed two additional alternate bots: banshee and nemesis.

After seeing Orbitron fight in the latest Faceoffs episode it had me thinking if Orbitrons design truly takes advantage of AI’s strengths. I was thinking about how fast the robots can move in robot sumo were and thought that was the right approach. Robots in robot sumo regularly move so fast that a human opponent would have no chance against them. I believe that making a robot that is very fast would leverage the advantages AI has over humans a bit more than making a robot that is simply more stable than most. So I was thinking a robot that is as fast if not faster than claw viper, with Omni-wheels, and a single hard hitting weapon (perhaps with a counter torque flywheel) would be better able to leverage the strengths of AI. It would be able to close distance with an opponents robot while making more complex maneuvers at speed to deliver a handful of devastating hits. This would obviously look very different from Orbitron and has a very different design philosophy. But what would you guys do? If you were to make a AI powered robot what would it look like?

It was fun to see a heavyweight version of Emulsifier compete in Battlebots. I personally think it would be cool to see more robots like Maximizer, Pramheda, Kazaa Lite, and Project LiftOff get heavyweight versions. What robots do you guys want to see get the heavyweight treatment?

Personally I have two, the first is that the arena hazards are a net negative for the competition and should be removed. My second is that I believe that Magnitude has the greatest potential out of all the Battlebots. If team magnitude can find a way to keep that bot from bouncing around after weapon hits (look at the manta fight to see what I mean), with some better driving I think it becomes a dominant force. I can’t wait to see more of it in Pro League, Ray Billings was impressed by it in his video too.

In my opinion I think that Ray Billings and Tombstone are under a lot of pressure. With more robots incorporating small but powerful brushless systems into their designs, robots are more compact and better armored than ever before. The ground game is also more intense than before. Tombstone is a bot that many are saying is outdated, after all it’s lost 5 out of its last 6 fights. But for pro league Tombstone is bringing so many new things to the table at once to try to modernize the robot. And from his videos it didn’t seem like Ray Billings had a whole lot of time to get all of this done. This feels like a sort of “do or die” type of situation but Tombstone has perhaps the strongest “brand” out of all the battlebots so I don’t think it will be forced out of competition for being “obsolete”, but I do think its performance in pro league will have HUGE ramifications on its reception going forward. But what team/bot do you guys think is under the most pressure?

I made a simple spreadsheet of all the groups in Battlebots Pro League to ultimately find the collective win percentages of the groups. I was expecting Group E to have the highest win percentage but surprisingly Group A had the best win rate. I used data from the Battlebots wiki which had the win/loss records for all the robots. It’s not the best way of collecting data, there are no records on Golden Fury for instance. But it was fun to make this.

BattleBots is a a crazy and violent sport and we quite often have to see our favorite bots get smashed up. My favorite bot is Copperhead and I think its fight against Chronos was when it got damaged the most (pictured). What picture shows the most damage your favorite battle bot has taken?