Robot Death Matches: A New Sport for the 21st Century - Wall Street Journal
IN A WAREHOUSE OUTSIDE Oakland, Calif., a massive chain saw is chewing through a washing machine, tearing and crumpling the white metal frame like paper, rattling the skid-steer loader to which it’s attached. For the next demonstration, we are advised to take cover.
“I have high hopes for this one,” Matt Oehrlein, the 30-year-old co-founder of MegaBots, says with a grin.
We crouch behind bulletproof plexiglass as a burly facilities manager drives the skid-steer—now fitted with a spinning, spike-covered wheel—straight into a second washing machine, which explodes on contact, sending shrapnel into the adjacent yard. Oehrlein wears the sheepish smile of a kid who just sent a baseball through a neighbor’s window. He has spent the past few weeks testing unorthodox weapons for his company’s latest giant robot, which will represent its country in a televised death match at some point next year.
In June 2015, MegaBots took to YouTube to pick a fight with Japan. The video, which has been viewed more than 6.9 million times, features co-founders Oehrlein and Gui Cavalcanti wearing American-flag capes as they showcase the Mark II, their paint-cannonball-throwing, 15-foot-tall steel creation. Engineers in Japan, home to a giant robot since 2012, enthusiastically accepted. Both teams have spent the past year preparing for combat and, in Oehrlein’s and Cavalcanti’s case, building a faster, stronger, even more giant robot: the Mark III, which is being welded into existence this year.
The original Mark II was outfitted, in the American tradition, with heavy artillery, while its Japanese counterpart had been built for martial-arts-style combat. The two countries compromised: Next year’s battle will feature both long- and short-range attacks. And fighting style isn’t the only cultural clash embodied by the coming duel. Kuratas, the four-plus-ton, 13-foot-tall Japanese robot, was originally a nonviolent passion project for creator Kogoro Kurata, an artist and a blacksmith from Japan. His giant robot is available for purchase on Amazon, in the “riding toy- tricycle” category, for about $1.25 million (no takers so far).
The Americans have other ideas. Their challenge was a last-ditch effort after their failed first Kickstarter campaign nearly forced MegaBots into bankruptcy before it could achieve its real aim: reinvent sports for the 21st century and create a Formula One-style entertainment company in the process.
With the exception of improved camera angles and new rules designed to speed up games or heighten tension, sports like baseball and basketball have remained largely unchanged for decades. Meanwhile, entirely new sports have recently entered the mainstream. Last year, 36 million people streamed the world finals of the videogame contest League of Legends. Put another way, more spectators tuned in to watch other people play videogames than Game 7 of the 2016 NBA finals. This year’s League of Legends world finals will be at the Staples Center in Los Angeles; the arena’s 18,000 seats sold out in under 45 minutes. In September a drone-racing league announced it had raised more than $12 million and signed with ESPN.
Despite their age, traditional sports are more valuable than ever. The NFL’s revenue was a record $7.3 billion in 2015, and earlier this year, the Ultimate Fighting Championship—purchased for $2 million in 2000—sold for $4 billion. But both football and mixed martial arts are struggling to reconcile their audiences’ appetite for hard hits with the growing outcry over the long-term effects of head injuries. Into this complicated moment comes MegaBots, with its promise of graphic, guilt-free, made-for-TV violence. Of course, no people (or animals) are harmed in League of Legends’ bloody, dragon-filled battles. Videogames lack that human drama, but the first MegaBots battle will see Oehrlein and Cavalcanti piloting the Mark III from a steel cage in the robot’s chest. (These days, much of their engineering work—including consultations with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—is focused on emerging alive.) Drone races, like Nascar and hockey, will rely on unscheduled crashes and clashes for drama. “But 15-foot-tall, 10-ton manned robot warriors in a football-size stadium? That’s something 100,000 people can watch at the same time and be excited about,” says Josh Adler, MegaBots’ first investor.
After challenging Japan last year, the MegaBots co-founders raised $550,000 on Kickstarter and $3.85 million from investors. Their early career plans were less ambitious. Oehrlein is an electrical engineer by training, while Cavalcanti trained in mechanical engineering. Both men studied the unsexy technology of hydraulic power. Almost every robot in existence is powered by electric motors in its joints, a limiting factor when it comes to size. MegaBots are powered by hydraulics actuators, which generate power through pressurized pipes, enabling “Transformers”-style machines with the ability to stomp and whack at will.
MegaBots is structured as an entertainment company that happens to build robots. Its engineering process is dictated largely by safety, while its design process is mostly influenced by shock value and visual appeal. The Mark III’s arms are designed so they can be torn off midfight, while keeping the rest of the robot intact, because audiences enjoy dismemberment. The Institute for Human & Machine Cognition was recently hired to write code; one of the tasks included making the robot appear to be catching its breath.
The coming battle is more than just a competition—it’s proof of concept for robo- wars as spectator sport and anchor for a Marvel-style universe of videogames, toys, movies and competitions. Within two years, MegaBots hopes to have a league up and running where companies buy the basic kit and create their own tricked-out warriors. The Mark III costs about $750,000 in materials—up to $2.5 million if you include labor—and MegaBots is testing out trade-offs for less expensive materials and pricing out economies of scale for the kits.
But sports are played for love, not money, and there’s another reason to consider robots as an eventual successor to our national pastime, according to MegaBots’ founders. When a child’s dream to play in the NFL flames out, “there’s not really a lot of options for you, career-wise,” Oehrlein says. By contrast, if you fail to become a giant-robot pilot, “the fallback is to work as an engineer, make six figures and improve technology for mankind.”
Uncategorized
#Uncategorized
No comments: