Robot Combat Needs YOU.

For, my goodness, twelve or thirteen years I have been running a low budget middle school combat robotics program here in Wisconsin.  Click on the "Robotics" tag to see lots more.

I share the arena with Dean, an old pal from the days of building the full sized Battlebots machines.  He runs a companion version of Machines Behaving Badly over in Minnesota.

Robot Combat had a meteoric rise in popularity, then an equally fast retreat.  Probably the biggest factor was the expense....unless you were prepared to shell out many thousands of dollars your robot and your investments of time, energy and at least some thousands of dollars quickly became shredded bits of debris.  And by quickly I mean potentially in under a minute!

The success of Machines Behaving Badly has been due to the diligent volunteer efforts of Minions like Dean, and to the unyielding commitment to keeping it cheap.  It is hard to cut a program when my usual rejoinder is:

"Budget?  We don't need no steenkin' budget!"

But even a program run on a shoestring occcasionaly needs, well, a new shoestring.  So Dean has cooked up a kickstarter program to whip up a new arena.  

It is a worthy cause, and I say this realizing that if it succeeds I will have no option but to keep running this silly robotic dog and pony show until, and perhaps after, I get tossed into a nursing home by my appropriately alarmed children.

If you think that is a good idea, or if you just like the notion of demented pre-teens building combat robots out of implausible scrap componants, check out the link below.

Because really, what's the worst that could happen?  Oh....right.

Kickstart that Robot Apocalypse!

And of course, a new and easier to transport arena tempts us to expand Machines Behaving Badly to new territories.....if you are in Minnesota or Wisconsin and interested, get in touch!