Meet the Leeds engineers starting their own Robot Wars

Maybe Craig Charles will present it?


Anyone alive in the late 90s and early 2000’s will remember watching Robot Wars because it was possibly the best show on British television. For those who don’t remember it, basically people build radio-controlled weaponised robots and then battle them in an arena until one of the robots is totally destroyed, or the time runs out.

The show is making a comeback on BBC, but a group of engineering students at Leeds have decided they’d much rather organise their own robot wars. The Tab got in touch with them to find out more.

Engineers from left: Julian Hird, Tamaryn Hourihan and Peter Nye

Tell us a bit about yourselves, and the robots…

Peter: Julian, Tam & I are all third-year mechatronics & robotics students, as are a most of the people who’ve been involved from early on, although more recently there’s been people getting involved from elsewhere.

Personally, I’ve been doing RC (radio control) stuff for years; when the original robot wars was on, I managed to persuade my dad to help me build a robot; wasn’t a fighting one, but was theoretically a firefighting robot; it was made out of an old printer stand, a few parts from a pair of identical mkii fiestas we found in a scrapyard, and a broken RC car; shot out a vinegar & washing soda foam that absolutely stank. Kind of carried on from there.


Robot Wars’ Razer was not to be effed with

How did the robot wars thing start?

Julian: It all started back just before Easter this year when the official Robot Wars was opening up entries for the new series and someone suggested in our course group that we should try and put together a robot to enter. When entries closed people were still very interested in making fighting robots and someone suggested we could run our own robot wars instead. So we met up, discussed a little bit about what everyone wanted to try and do and then myself and peter kinda ended up taking the lead on trying to make it happen. Recently we made the decision to run this all as a shock soc event which has been super fab.

So how exactly is it going to work? 

Julian:  What we have ended up organising is a budget miniature robot wars with each robot restricted to 20x20x20cm in size and can only use certain materials (that are usually found going for scraps in the engineering workshops).

So when a team enters we will give them a battery; a safety link containing a fuse and removable link and then couple of receivers and transmitters to be shared between all entrants. There’s a few restrictions on rotary spinning blades for safety reasons but apart from that we’ve tried to keep options really open for people.

I really wanted to make sure that anyone with enough enthusiasm could enter so we’ve done lots of work in trying to construct a kind of template robot that people can borrow bits from, giving a small talk on designing robots this coming week and i wanted to offer general advice as well as hooking up to shock SOCs catch up sessions on Friday afternoons

They’ve already made robot prototypes

There’s going to be an arena, right?

Julian: Yes. The arena itself is going to be around 1.7m by 1.7m. It will also feature a pit and other obstacles. We’re in the process of designing this now so we will see what we can fit in.

Obviously safety’s very important so that’s why we have included a battery fuse, a removable link so we can kill power easily. The arena the robots will be put in is going to be constructed using polycarbonate, that’s the stuff tool guards and bus shelters are made from, its very tough stuff. The battery will be housed in a section of steel to avoid it getting punctuated and on the day we will be enforcing strict transmitter control.

When is this robot wars happening? 

Peter: As for the event itself, we’re booking out one of the rooms in the union (function, I believe) for December 1st. So far, we’ve been selling tickets for robot entries; we decided on an entry fee of £10 per robot (to cover parts costs), and entries are open till Wednesday. Haven’t yet got organised with regards to spectators, but we will be selling tickets some time soon; we’ll need to discuss that probably this week. We’re not really sure how many people we’re expecting at the minute, but we’re not expecting masses.

And lastly, are the robots going to be taking over anytime soon?

Peter: Yes. We’re all doomed, and we’re all going to die. We are merely paving the way to clear humankind from the face of the earth so our glorious robotic children can make the world a better place. However, we’ll do that later, as this batch of killer robots are all controlled by remote control, and are being locked inside a large polycarbonate box

Tamaryn: At this stage it’s hard to say but with the way technology is advancing these days, with the innovation that happens each year and the passion of people in this industry, sentient robots could become a realistic possibility in the next 10 years. As far as manufacturing robots, they are already replacing people as we speak.

Julian: Machines have been killing humans for years we may be nearing a point when they might know they are doing it. There’s actually a really thought provoking bit at the the end of a Phillip K Dick book where the main character looks at his own (and most likely humanities) impending doom and takes solace in the fact that the robots driving us towards extinction are already developing weapons to kill each other. So maybe our future could end up with us no longer being top of the food chain and watching our own creations kill each over over dumb stuff.

All sounds very Black Mirror, I can’t wait.