The Future is Nothing but a Robot Punch

October 18, 2017 8:04 AM

The long-awaited duel between America's Megabots and Japan's Suidobashi Heavy Industry has finally arrived (YT).

Pre-Fight Smack:

Kuratas previously

MegaBots Call Out

Kuratas Team Response

Eagle Prime on the proving ground

posted by Krazor (36 comments total)

I watched this earlier. The fight itself is much slower than what I could deal with.

I wanted Pacific Rim or Transformers or that movie with the rock-'em-sock-'em bots no one watched. Instead it's like watching a couple of drunks posturing outside a bar.
posted by cjorgensen at 8:18 AM on October 18, 2017

Except one of the drunks has a ten-foot long chain saw.
posted by JimInLoganSquare at 8:19 AM on October 18, 2017 [2 favorites]

Okay, a couple of drunks posturing outside a Canadian bar.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:21 AM on October 18, 2017 [36 favorites]

I find the giant robot thing fascinating in the sense of why are only Japan and the US seriously into it?
posted by GallonOfAlan at 8:25 AM on October 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

So... Team America gets to use a second robot, but Team Japan only gets the one? I fail to see how this is fair.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:25 AM on October 18, 2017 [3 favorites]

The giant robot equivalent to Kirk versus Gorn.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 8:28 AM on October 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

More cop outs with wheels and tank treads. Unless these things can walk, I'm uninterested.

I want Boston Dynamics to build one.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:30 AM on October 18, 2017 [4 favorites]

Team Japan gets a robot to beat up and Team America gets a robot to beat up. Seems fair to me.
posted by colin.jaquiery at 8:30 AM on October 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

Ok, clicked into the middle and when the red one did not pick up a drum and fling it across at the other 'bot', well that's as far as I got. One of the giant hulking fighting machines did manage to flick a drone that came too close, but it may have just been accidental.
posted by sammyo at 8:37 AM on October 18, 2017

That was exactly as dramatic and as convincing as WrestleMania III
posted by Optamystic at 8:44 AM on October 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

That was exactly as dramatic and as convincing as WrestleMania III

It turns out what we wanted was Robot Sports Entertainment.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:47 AM on October 18, 2017 [2 favorites]

The live-action Evangelion movie is disappointing. #GetInTheGoKartShinji
posted by Strange Interlude at 8:48 AM on October 18, 2017 [4 favorites]

"I wanted Pacific Rim or Transformers or that movie with the rock-'em-sock-'em bots no one watched."

You mean Robot Jocks?

I sure watched it.
posted by jonathanhughes at 8:50 AM on October 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

I find the giant robot thing fascinating in the sense of why are only Japan and the US seriously into it?

I suppose it's an extension of the giant monster thing, whose origin story is rooted in US-Japan relations.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:50 AM on October 18, 2017

These things are just sort of bad tanks that aren't allowed to have a giant artillery cannon. Assuming that you could make Mecha like we see in pop-culture, it's also always struck me that those tend to be bad tanks too. The one benefit they have is being super agile, and mimicking human movement which would (hypothetically) allow the pilot to act more strategically and skillfully than a relatively cumbersome thing like a tank.

With the way the world is going, I'm almost glad that a remote controlled death bot is fairly ineffective at fighting another remote controlled death bot, even if it doesn't make for good spectacle.

I wonder how effective it would be if your weapon was just a big water cannon that sprayed the other robot in an attempt to flood their engines and short circuit their electronics? Maybe use some sort of custom liquid that was purposefully designed to gum up machinery?
posted by codacorolla at 8:55 AM on October 18, 2017

Relatedly, are other people as bored as me by the latest Battlebots on Science thing? Lots of extraneous noise, lots of operator/builder 2nd-rate trash talking, lots of announcer and commentator lame jokes and fake enthusiasm, all surrounding some mildly interesting ROV conflicts. No actual robots, of course, and the conflicts are much too small a portion of the program.

Or is it just me?
posted by Kirth Gerson at 9:12 AM on October 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

Relatedly, are other people as bored as me by the latest Battlebots on Science thing?

On a similar note, who here thinks a forklift could easily beat either of those?
posted by aubilenon at 9:15 AM on October 18, 2017 [3 favorites]

Even with my extremely lowered expectations of what an IRL giant robot fight would actually look like, this was pretty disappointing. Apparently I didn't lower my expectations enough to include "mainly just two machines pushing into each other for a while."

It's certainly unfair to expect to see anything like you'd see in film or video games where giant robots fight each other, but come on. My Dinner with Andre had better fight sequences.
posted by chambers at 10:18 AM on October 18, 2017 [2 favorites]

who here thinks a forklift could beat either of those?

Depends on the operator
posted by zippy at 10:19 AM on October 18, 2017 [2 favorites]

From what I understand, the reason Team US gets two robots is that the Japanese team built a robot to defeat Iron Glory, but by that time the US team had already built Eagle Prime, and the Japanese team asked for the right to also face off against Iron Glory instead of just the newer better robot.
posted by corb at 10:42 AM on October 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

who here thinks a forklift could beat either of those?

Depends on the operator

Forklift safety is the opposite of what I am interested in.
posted by aubilenon at 11:02 AM on October 18, 2017

I don't care what all you media-jaded hipsters think.

I ate it up with a spoon. A very large spoon.

Although I do think it was a bit of a Mayweather/MacGregor thing, but cooler.
posted by Samizdata at 11:14 AM on October 18, 2017 [3 favorites]

who here thinks a forklift could beat either of those?

This lead me to wonder if a forklift or a skidsteer was better, which lead me down a youtube rabbit hole.
posted by drezdn at 11:18 AM on October 18, 2017

Forklift safety is the opposite of what I am interested in.

This Forklift/Guillotine combination may be more your style. (This was the only vaguely usable depiction of it I could find, unfortunately.It's from the Deathrace:2000-inspired, incredibly gory and violent video game from 1997 called Carmageddon).

I may be wrong, but something about your response tells me you may not have watched that safety film in its entirety. If so, don't skip to the end, and just let things unfold.
posted by chambers at 11:47 AM on October 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

The first one was shorter than Clay-Liston II.

Once again I say, this is fine, but I'd like to see robots rather than a bunch of human-operated machines. (For instance- self-driving forklifts)
posted by MtDewd at 11:48 AM on October 18, 2017

Relatedly, are other people as bored as me by the latest Battlebots on Science thing?

It's the same thing with Project Runway, whether you're into fashion or not this is a group of folks highly skilled in their field competing under time/technical/artistic constraints and what is too much of the air time? some made up in the editing room drama.

On a similar note, who here thinks a forklift could easily beat either of those?

Totally, ran a bunch of those in my youth and they are amazing maneuverable and if the hydraulics are tuned up the accuracy of the blades are millimeter, a tiny seam, leverage, that battle bot is toast.
posted by sammyo at 11:50 AM on October 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

I watch a lot of those battlebots show. This was basically a bigger, slower version. But I, too, also ate it up with a large spoon.

Also, incredible props to them finding a field interviewer that spoke both English and Japanese fluently so she could get reactions from both instead of needing a translator. That's progress right there.
posted by numaner at 12:37 PM on October 18, 2017 [5 favorites]

The Megabots crew started in a makerspace in Somerville so I have a bit of hometown bias/defensiveness going here, but for the people who think they can take on Eagle Prime with a forklift, I think it depends on the size of the arena and whether or not your forklift operating skills are good enough to dodge the paintball cannon.
posted by bl1nk at 12:53 PM on October 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

I want Boston Dynamics to build one

Gui used to work there, actually. He also helped found this and was on this.

Granted this was a bit on the contrived side, but still cool stuff and a cool guy.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 1:24 PM on October 18, 2017 [2 favorites]

Yep. While at AA, Gui was also part of the group trying to build "Stompy", a big-assed hexapod robot. While Gui went west, most of the rest of the Stompy folks are still around - I believe Stompy itself is in Cambridge, MA, at the moment.
posted by rmd1023 at 5:46 PM on October 18, 2017

Yeah, that was really anticlimactic and heavily staged, especially with the lighting truss stuff and the commentators fleeing and all that.

I actually felt bad for Kuratas at the end when the rock chainsaw started tearing stuff up. He/they have been working on that bot for what, 15+ years now? (Also, I'm pretty sure the chainsaw is a slit trencher, used for cutting thin, shallow slits in dirt and loose rock soil to bury cable or flexible pipeline.)

This also shows how hard large robots really are. Pick any given fictional giant robot story - Robotech, GitS, Transformers, Gundam, Orguss, Macross - the amount of engineering and energy required is just ridiculous.

And even with our strongest, stiffest, lightest materials once you get past a certain size or scale the amount of flex, and the energy requirements to be able to move that kind of mass around at anything resembling human/animal like speeds starts pushing into the territory of megawatts.

However... I would like to note that I recently saw pictures of a small tracked bobcat style backhoe tool that not only had all the usual bulldozer, blade and backhoe attachments, but it had two tool arm mounts and arms, and they appeared to be on the front of the cabin of the vehicle. So you could do something like, say, have a grappling tool on one arm and a jackhammer or shearing tool on the other.
posted by loquacious at 6:23 PM on October 18, 2017 [2 favorites]

This would have been cooler if there had been robots.

robot. noun. a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer.
posted by gurple at 10:38 PM on October 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

Think of them as proto-jaegers.
posted by rmd1023 at 6:05 AM on October 19, 2017

Giant robot battle: Who knew a duel between chainsaw-armed mech suits could be so boring?
posted by cjorgensen at 11:27 AM on October 19, 2017

AVClub: That giant robot battle was fake because there is nothing good left in this world
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:27 PM on October 19, 2017 [2 favorites]

It's amazing that it was faked and yet still so dull.
posted by codacorolla at 3:45 PM on October 19, 2017 [1 favorite]