Sixty teams from all over the world arrived in Long Beach, California.
For two weeks, the crews worked from 6 a.m. until midnight.
All of this was to compete in the Discovery Channel’s “BattleBots.”
Santa Fe resident Sabri Sansoy made the trek out with his teammates with Ghost Raptor.
“Given the pandemic, there were a lot of people there,” he says. “These are true engineers, and I’ve learned so much from these folks. I felt like the third wheel sometimes.”
“BattleBots” returned to TV on Dec. 3. New episodes air at 6 p.m. Thursdays on the Discovery Channel.
The series has competitors design and operate remote-controlled armed and armored machines designed to fight in an arena combat elimination tournament.
Each bot will face off with the goal of making it into a 32-team, single elimination tournament, where only one can emerge the winner of The Giant Nut trophy.
In February 2018, the Discovery Channel and Science picked up “Battle Bots” for its eighth season.
The 10th season was originally scheduled to premiere in May but was postponed to December because of the pandemic.
“What’s amazing is that no one got COVID,” Sabroy says. “We got tested every day. On set, the rules were very stringent and we had to follow all of the safety practices.”
Ghost Raptor is led by Chuck Pitzer, who has been competing for 17 years. The rest of the team is rounded out by Vincent Cheung, Darryl Dawson, Eric Diehr and Sansoy.
Sansoy says the challenge with “BattleBots” is to design the perfect machine.
Then you battle with another team in the tournament.
“You have to repair the robot often,” he says. “Sometimes you don’t have the parts and you have to be resourceful. Then if you make it all the way to the top, you’re talking about 10-15 battles in.”
Sansoy says the competition does take a toll.
“I’m usually a robot lover and not a fighter,” he says with a laugh. “It’s heartbreaking to see your beautiful robot get destroyed.”
Sansoy is an MIT-educated, seasoned entrepreneur with a passion for all things artificial intelligence.
As one of the world’s leading AI experts, he’s leveraged several of the 30-plus subcategories of AI, such as machine learning, robotics, computer vision, and natural language in the entertainment, agriculture and now energy worlds.
He’s built autonomous paintball gun robots that would detect and fire at humans for a Ridley Scott project entitled “AI vs Humans,” and he’s developing an autonomous beachcombing “crab-like” robot that uses AI to recognize and pick up cigarette butts and bottle caps.
“I’ve been doing this for years, and I’m continually impressed where technology is going,” he says.
