BattleBots Is Coming Back This Summer

Geeks rejoice: After more than a decade, BattleBots is coming back to TV. The new show is slated to have a run of six episodes and will air on ABC summer 2015.

BattleBots, a tournament in which competitors pit armed remote-control robots against each other, first aired on Comedy Central in 2000. After five seasons, the show was abruptly canceled when Comedy Central was sold to MTV and the network decided that a show about fighting robots wasn’t going to resonate with their audience.

In its final years, the show also began to receive some criticism from its fans. As Popular Science put it, “Robot Darwinism” took hold: Competitors soon learned that a wedge-shaped robot could simply flip just about anything else, no matter how many chainsaws, flamethrowers, and exploding sledgehammers were welded onto it.

Wedge bots did the impossible: They made a show about real-life fighting robots boring.

And people are asking, how will the 2015 reboot of BattleBots be any different?

While there’s no information on whether wedge-shaped bots will be allowed (Scy-Fy’s Robot Fighting League straight-out banned them), you have to remember that BattleBots aired over a decade ago.

These days, we have swarm robotics. We have 3D printers and a widespread community of open-source hardware. We have consumer-level technologies that only the military had access to a decade ago. The sheer innovation that will go into the new generation of BattleBots is going to make the show worth watching all by itself.

Are you ready to rumble?


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Author Profile: Consumer Expert Andrew Handley

I'm the social media manager for Listverse.com and the editor of Eli Nixon's upcoming sci-fi thriller Son of Tesla, available now for pre-order from Amazon.

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