Went to the Robot Combat League National Championship
The Robot Combat League is a kind of amateur "Battle Bots" tournament league based in the USA. If you're the kind of person who has dreamed of building a battle bot, I highly recommend checking out their events website and looking for events near you. Their main website is here, and they've got a wiki where they explain their rules, weight classes, and other info.
I'd learned about them through bicycling, actually - last year, an organization in Long Beach led a bike ride from downtown Long Beach up one of the river paths to a middle school parking lot, where a local RCL event was being held. I missed that ride, but immediately began looking for the next big SoCal battlebot event. I ended up attending their national championships weekend before last at the "Discovery Cube," a children's science museum in Santa Ana.
The event was fucking incredible. I have no time or really any desire to build my own robot to battle with, but I would attend another one of these in a heartbeat. Here are some pictures:
The best action was in the gigantic arena for the heaviest weight class, but some pretty crazy stuff happened in the smaller classes, too. At one point, a robot caught on fire in the big arena. They picked it up and threw it in a trash can full of sand. We had to go look at the smaller arenas while they aired it out with two gigantic ventilators. We ended up seeing two tiny ant-weight robots systematically break off one another's PLA armor, then get stuck together in the heat of battle (and detatched with barbeque tongs). We also saw another small robot get flung so high in the air it got stuck on the lighting system in its arena...
The cutest robot of the day was this one, made out of a keg with googly eyes. It had a chain with an axe head attached to one end. It would spin in circles, ideally, and bash the opponent. Unfortunately, both times we saw it battle, it got stuck on the edge of the arena and completely immobilized:
I also really appreciated the Canada-themed robot depicted above. It had so many different safety immobilizers attached to it when they placed it in the arena - each robot had to come with things to prevent its parts from injuring someone who was holding it if it was accidentally energized. So the canada robot had pool noodles on the sharp edges of its plow, multiple clamps covering the spiky end of its toothed basher arm, and some gigantic metal bars immobilizing the arm itself:
In general, the safety culture of this event was super strong, it seemed like? I was just an attendee, so I was not really the main audience of this event - it seems like it's primarily FOR the people participating in the actual battles, in the same way that the model rocket launch events I used to attend are for the people launching the rockets. But I found it super well-run and generally impressive all around.
Cannot recommend this shit enough. You really gotta go look at that event list and find some robot battles near you! They even got a map for the US!