When my son was a little boy, we listened to They Might Be Giants a lot, especially the album No, which has a song called “Robot Parade.” It says, “In a future time, children will work together to build a giant cyborg. Robot Parade!” Well, the future has come and my son builds robots—that battle and destroy each other for sport. He has competed in Southern California and the Central Coast, at National Havoc Robot League NHRL in Connecticut, and, most recently, he took a major role in designing and building the 250-pound MaDCatTer robot for competition in the BattleBots television show in Las Vegas. I offered to set up a quick ‘n’ dirty photo booth to document the robots at an event held during the spring of 2024 at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California. This event was hosted at “Mt. SAC,” by Martin Mason, who is an amazing engineering teacher and a big name in the world of combat robotics. (He also leads of the team that builds and competes with the MaDCatTer robot.) Shown here are little robots—about 3 to 5 pounds—but these machines are full of inventive features that make them faster, more powerful, and more resilient that you’d think. In the second group of pictures below, you can see the arenas these robots fight in (by remote control of their impassioned creators). Robots often launch each other to the roofs with powerful spinning weapons, and it is common to see smoke fill the plexiglass colosseums as robots throw flames and ravage opponents’ battery packs.
