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The podcast that brings you the stories of the builders behind BattleBots.
Episodes
Wednesday Aug 26, 2020
Wednesday Aug 26, 2020
This week on the podcast, we have a special, last-minute guest—BattleBots co-creator Greg Munson! On Monday, BattleBots announced that filming would start in October, with 57 teams competing. We try to extract as much information from Greg as possible.
Later, our panel discussion with female BattleBots captains Andrea Gellatly (Witch Doctor), Sarah Malyan (Nelly the Ellybot), Jen Herchenroeder (HiJinx), Julia Chernushevich (Ferocity) and Lilith Specht (Sporkinok)!
We filmed the panel before a live (virtual!) audience at Maker Faire Miami, and took tons of questions from fans. It was a lot of fun, and we’re looking forward to hosting more BattleBots panels in the future.
Link to video of the panel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_rhR1TuqlY
This week’s news stories:
BattleBots 2020 filming confirmed: https://twitter.com/BattleBots/status/1297933803424370688
A beardless Chris Rose: https://twitter.com/ChrisRose/status/1297252931184410624
Skorpios goes brushless: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=754664375289127
HiJinx’s new receivers: https://twitter.com/HiJinxBattleBot/status/1297685194346868736
Partial weapons test by Aegis: https://www.instagram.com/p/CEPXuT8jIJY/
BETA’s electromagnets: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2608183406065631
Nelly the Ellybot team statement: https://www.facebook.com/teampunchant/posts/622795461708432
Malice’s custom notebook: https://www.facebook.com/malicebattlebot/photos/a.101854611343417/190982199097324
Matthew and Jason Vasquez earn SolidWorks certifications: https://www.facebook.com/FastElectricRobots/photos/a.232649624139481/874254803312290
Video #6 in the Witch Doctor Junior series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE35bdztkrY
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Wednesday Aug 19, 2020
Wednesday Aug 19, 2020
This week on the podcast, our panel discussion with the 2019 BattleBots Top 4: Paul Ventimiglia (Bite Force), Andrea and Mike Gellatly (Witch Doctor), Ray Billings (Tombstone) and Julie Pitts and Miles Blow (DeathRoll).
We filmed the panel before a live (virtual!) audience at Maker Faire Miami, and took tons of questions from fans. It was a lot of fun, and we’re looking forward to hosting more BattleBots panels in the future.
This week’s news stories:
Extinguisher’s firefighting canisters: https://www.facebook.com/ExtinguisherBattlebot/photos/a.374736196441568/697719647476553/?type=3
Calvin Iba’s new flamethrower: https://www.instagram.com/p/CD19clHDexY/
Luke Quin’s new hobbyweight weapons test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSN-fjbc_kM
ESC interview with BattleBots commentator Chris Rose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoKs9ypROkk
Win Mammoth’s bones: https://www.facebook.com/MammothBattlebot/photos/a.2289061981322191/2816666928561691/
Jennifer Aniston is Trying to Kill Me: https://twitter.com/CMDanby/status/1294629043019669504
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Wednesday Aug 12, 2020
Wednesday Aug 12, 2020
This week on the podcast, we catch up with Tracer builder Jason Woods!
As a high schooler, Jason built his first bot which he took to compete at BattleBots during the Comedy Central days. Since then, Jason has been building nonstop - everything from combat robots to ingenuitive curiosities. You may recognize him from his appearances on Shark Tank where he once sought funding for his rad invention, the Kymera Body Board. Jason is full of stories and hard learned wisdom that he's gathered throughout these many experiences.
Surprisingly, his new bot, Tracer, was built in near-complete secrecy from the rest of the community. Listen as he takes us through his inspiration for the bot, his expectations for next season, and the grudge matches he's looking forward to most!
Kymera Body Board: https://kymera.com/
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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