202.6K
Downloads
219
Episodes
The podcast that brings you the stories of the builders behind BattleBots.
Episodes
Wednesday Aug 05, 2020
Wednesday Aug 05, 2020
This week on the podcast, we catch up with Quantum captains (and brothers) James Cooper and Grant Cooper!
Outside of combat robotics (Robot Wars! BattleBots! King of Bots!), the Coopers run Robo Challenge, a studio that makes robots, and other cool things, for TV shows, commercials and promotional campaigns. They’ve built things for everything from the Abu Dhabi Royal Family to Xbox, notably an inflatable ball that someone used to run across the Irish Sea, one piece of a scary attraction at a popular theme park in England, and a bunch of robots seen on British TV shows like The Gadget Show.
Combat robotics fans know them for their extensive work on the reboot of Robot Wars, where they built the House Robots, helped design the arena and rulebook, and ran the technical side of the house during filming. They built the devastatingly effective bots Spectre (winner of King of Bots Season 1) and Quantum, which advanced to the Top 16 in its rookie season on BattleBots.
Among builders, Team Robo Challenge is widely regarded as among the best designers in the sport. In 2019, the builders themselves awarded Quantum a Giant Bolt for Best Design.
Follow us on Facebook: facebook.com/behindthebots
Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts
Tell a friend about the show; we really appreciate your support!
Wednesday Jul 29, 2020
Wednesday Jul 29, 2020
This week on the podcast, we catch up with MadCatter captain Martin Mason! Martin is an engineering and physics professor, rocket propulsion enthusiast, combat robotics competitor across the US and China, and one of BattleBots' biggest personalities. We chat with him about his many experiences in and out of the box...and he talks some trash along the way!
Angry Sloth Robotics’ review of the new Duck! and Rotator Hexbugs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vrymsRQ64I
Follow us on Facebook: facebook.com/behindthebots
Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts
Tell a friend about the show; we really appreciate your support!
Wednesday Jul 22, 2020
Wednesday Jul 22, 2020
This week on the podcast, we catch up two incredible engineers—Chomp captain Zoe Stephenson and teammate Jascha Little!
Zoe and Jascha are a wife-and-husband team who work together as engineers on experimental projects at Applied Invention. Their most visible project, perhaps, is The Long Now Foundation's 10,000 Year Clock, a massive mechanical timekeeper that is designed to survive and tell time until the year 12,000. (Some fans may know that Bronco team captain Zander Rose is the director of The Long Now Foundation).
It’s unbelievably difficult to design an object to survive for 10,000 years—metals corrode, moving parts seize up, materials that touch one another run the risk of chemically reacting to one another in strange ways. For inspiration, the team looked to the past and the designs of other mechanical objects, early timepieces and mechanical computers. It’s a fascinating project, and one that we will most certainly continue to talk about on the show.
BattleBots fans know Zoe and Jascha for Chomp, the AI-infused hammerbot that ended Paul Ventimiglia’s championship run in 2016. This year, Chomp is back—as a superheavyweight walker bot with a turret-mounted hammer. Zoe and Jascha talk at length about the design, and the technical challenges they face as they try to cut weight from the bot.
We really enjoyed this interview, and we hope you do, too.
Link to Chomp’s GitHub repository: https://github.com/contradict/stomp
Follow us on Facebook: facebook.com/behindthebots
Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts
Tell a friend about the show; we really appreciate your support!
Wednesday Jul 15, 2020
Wednesday Jul 15, 2020
This week on the podcast, we catch up with South Korea’s coolest combat robotics builder, Team ORBY captain Cheog-Gyu Hwang!
Cheog-Gyu’s story is familiar in many ways—he started watching combat robotics on TV as a middle schooler, and decided to build his own combat robots in college, where he was studying to become a mechanical engineer. Today, he builds robots for a living.
What’s unique is that his community of builders is almost entirely virtual. There are less than a dozen combat robotics teams in South Korea, and Team ORBY is basically the only heavyweight team in the entire country. Cheog-Gyu took his hard-hitting horizontal bar spinner Blade to King of Bots, and is eager to show the world what he’s capable of once BattleBots returns.
This was such a delightful interview. We learned that ORBY is an acronym (!), Cheog-Gyu built his own massive CNC machine, and his own combat robotics box. He’s currently building an electric violin for his wife, who’s a professional violinist and combat roboteer.
Follow us on Facebook: facebook.com/behindthebots
Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts
Tell a friend about the show; we really appreciate your support!
Wednesday Jul 08, 2020
Wednesday Jul 08, 2020
This week on the podcast, an abbreviated look at the week’s top news stories from the world of BattleBots and combat robotics, plus two stories from Robots Around the World. No interview this week—we’ll be back next week with a very special guest.
Follow us on Facebook: facebook.com/behindthebots
Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts
Tell a friend about the show; we really appreciate your support!
Wednesday Jul 01, 2020
Wednesday Jul 01, 2020
This week on the podcast, we sit down with the Vasquez family—Jeff, Debbie, Matthew and Jason—who field the hard-hitting heavyweight Whiplash!
Jeff and Debbie have been building combat robots since the early 2000s, and raised their sons in the sport. Today, the Vasquez family competes with robots in every weight class. They’re best known for Whiplash, the articulated lifter/vertical spinner that took on the hardest-hitting bots in 2019 BattleBots—and usually come out on top.
Outside of the BattleBox, Jeff builds and drives robots for film, TV shows and commercials. Matthew and Jason are both in college, and have become the public face of the team on BattleBots, working together to drive the robot and strategize outside the arena. Oh! And we talk about Fred!
Caleb Kempson’s Ko-Fi page: https://ko-fi.com/caleb_robot_art/gallery
Follow us on Facebook: facebook.com/behindthebots
Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts
Tell a friend about the show; we really appreciate your support!
Wednesday Jun 24, 2020
Wednesday Jun 24, 2020
This week on the podcast, we sit down with BattleBots co-creator Trey Roski!
In the mid-1990s, Trey and his cousin Greg Munson built the competition’s first meta design—La Machine—a tanky wedgebot that won the Robot Wars middleweight championship in 1995, and finished second in the heavyweight competitions in 1996 and 1997.
In 1999, as Robot Wars floundered in legal limbo, Greg and Trey launched BattleBots. Within a year, the competition was being broadcast to millions of fans on Comedy Central. Then the show went dark for more than a decade, as Greg and Trey worked in the background to bring it back to television. They succeeded in 2015, with the reboot of BattleBots.
Today, they’re trying to figure out how to put on the 2020 season of the show amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Follow us on Facebook: facebook.com/behindthebots
Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts
Tell a friend about the show; we really appreciate your support!
Wednesday Jun 17, 2020
Wednesday Jun 17, 2020
This week on the podcast, we invite back to the show (for his third time!) reigning BattleBots champion Paul Ventimiglia!
Bite Force remains the winningest heavyweight combat robot in modern BattleBots history, with three perfect seasons (2015, 2018 and 2019), and just one loss since the reboot—to the unconventional, AI-guided hammerbot Chomp.
Paul enters the 2020 season knowing that the field of bots will likely be the toughest the sport has ever seen. The COVID-19 pandemic gave builders months of extra time to work on their designs and build spare parts. Plus, 2020 will see the reintroduction of the super-heavyweight walker class—notably Chomp, which is expected to return with a 250-pound weight advantage over Bite Force, and a thirst to prove that their first victory wasn’t a fluke.
We check in with Paul to see where he’s at, what he’s thinking about, and ask him the question everyone wants to know: How the heck do you defeat this bot?
Follow us on Facebook: facebook.com/behindthebots
Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts
Tell a friend about the show; we really appreciate your support!
Wednesday Jun 10, 2020
Wednesday Jun 10, 2020
This week on the podcast, we talk to veteran BattleBots competitor—and first-time captain—Logan Davis!
Logan purchased SubZero from longtime builder Jerry Clarkin in 2019, and took it to Robot Ruckus later that year, where it wowed audiences by flipping Kraken so high, it left wheel marks on the ceiling. Logan is eager to prove what SubZero can do in 2020.
We also video recorded this episode - you can check it out here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=873238303188338
Caleb Kempson’s Ko-Fi page: https://ko-fi.com/caleb_robot_art/gallery
Follow us on Facebook: facebook.com/behindthebots
Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts
Tell a friend about the show; we really appreciate your support!
Wednesday Jun 03, 2020
Wednesday Jun 03, 2020
This week on the podcast, we jump into the water with one of the most beloved builders on BattleBots, Duck! captain Hal Rucker! Hal is an artist, designer, inventor and serial entrepreneur who happens to build the toughest heavyweight combat robot since the reboot. We talk about his history in the sport, the other things he’s passionate about, his design philosophy and why he redesigned Duck (again!) for 2020. Plus...listen in for a Behind the Bots first!
Lisa Winter’s tofu press: https://www.instructables.com/id/Simple-Sleek-Tofu-Press/
Witch Doctor Junior on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkAU8hRgrwQ
Part 3 of ‘How to Build a Duck’: https://www.facebook.com/BlackandBlueRobotics/videos/vb.2113570765539649/3053602774723914
Follow us on Facebook: facebook.com/behindthebots
Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts
Tell a friend about the show; we really appreciate your support!