Battlebots

BattleBots, also BattleBots Inc., is an American company whose purpose is to host combat robot competitions. BattleBots is also the name of the television show created from the competition footage, and a nickname for the combat robots which compete. BattleBots Inc. is headquartered in Novato, California and holds most of its competitions in San Francisco.

The BattleBox

The BattleBox is a square arena, 48 feet by 48 feet, designed to protect the drivers, officials, and audience from flying shrapnel and charging bots. It has a steel floor and steel-framed walls and roof paneled with thick, bulletproof polycarbonate plastic. The teams bring their robots in through doorways, which are then sealed when all the humans have exited. The drivers control their machines from outside the sealed arena.

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Arena hazards

Operated by "Pulverizer Pete," the arena hazards are intended to make fights more interesting and unpredictable, and to reward drivers who can avoid the hazards while pushing or carrying their opponent into them. The hazards include:

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• Spike Strips
• The walls of the arena are covered with foot-long sharpened steel spikes. Pushing an opponent hard into a wall can sometimes mean a stuck opponent.
• Spinners
• These high-speed record players can interfere with a robot's driving. They won't do damage to a robot, but they can make it move rather crookedly!
• Kill Saws
• The Kill Saws are aptly named. Coming out of the floor at high speed as soon as a robot drives over the red slots, these diamond-tipped saws can tear into a bot's tires or chassis, or even throw a smaller bot across the arena.
• Pistons
• Pistons are steel columns that raise and lower from the floor without warning. As they're not sharp or particularly fast, they don't do much damage to robots, but they can stop a charging robot or flip one over.
• Ramrods
• Ramrods are the painful variant of pistons- sharpened steel spikes that come out of the arena floor.
• Hell Raisers
• Even the floor is not to be trusted. If a robot drives over the center of the arena, it will find itself driving on a $15deg$ tilt.
• Pulverizers
• The most dangerous of all obstacles, the high-powered hammers known as the Pulverizers mark each corner of the arena. A robot under a pulverizer will usually get destroyed in short order unless it gets out from under it quickly; Bill Nye The Science Guy has calculated that each pulverizer hit is equivalent to a car being dropped on the hapless robot.