You see this a lot now on the show where they’re spinning up really fast, going in for a hit. They’ve got more technology built into them, so the team can have a person monitoring things like heat, and they’ll know when to, for instance, shut a weapon down. They’re able to handle way more amperage through the system, so they don’t blow up. The ESC form factors have gotten smaller. And besides its giant gel cell batteries, which were probably a third of the weight, we had this big old Vantex speed controller with a big giant heat sink. We built a robot called Bombmachine back in the day. Now you can have these massively spinning disk weapons, or bar weapons, or drum weapons that can literally obliterate the other robot.

But with the advent of lithium technology, when the battery packs could be different sizes and shapes, that’s when things just took off in terms of power-to-weight ratio. In the early days, people were using car batteries. “BattleBots” premiered on Comedy Central in, I think it was, 2000. Greg Munson: Probably the biggest is battery technology.

What are the biggest changes you’ve seen, technology-wise, over 20 years or so?

We thought it was a good moment to get a different perspective on the show, so Spectrum asked one of the founders of “BattleBots” and its current executive producer, Greg Munson, about how two decades’ worth of technological progress has impacted the competition. This week, tickets went on sale for audience seating for the next season of “BattleBots” filming will commence in October in Las Vegas. Her team, Ghostraptor, was knocked out of the regular competition after losing its first and second fights, though they regained some glory by winning a round in the bonus Golden Bolt tournament, which recently finished airing on the TBS TV channel. Earlier this year, friend-of- IEEE Spectrum and fashiontech designer Anouk Wipprecht gave a peek of what it’s like to be a competitor on “BattleBots,” the 22-year-old robot-combat competition, from the preparation “pit” to the arena.

Download rc battlebots