The MegaBots team devoted the first episode of its new web series to beating the hell out of its most recent creation. Over the course of seven and a half minutes, the company puts the poor robot through hell, shooting it with its own gun and whacking the hell out of it with a wrecking ball, until it finally, mercifully, tips over.
“In almost every trial,” the company explains in a new release issued this morning, “the pilots would have been either seriously injured or killed.”
Certainly the team of guys who dressed like matching American flags for their recent appearance at TechCrunch Disrupt wouldn’t be above a bit of theatrics for the sake of itself, but as Hayward-based company preps for its upcoming battle with Team Japan, dying inside a 15-foot-tall fighting robot is apparently pretty high on the list of pitfalls to avoid.
So, naturally, MegaBots’ web series is set to shift focus to the creation of Mk. III, the company’s latest shot at creating a battle-ready giant fighting robot. The second episode of the show focuses on the new robot, which features, among other things, a newly designed roll cage inspired by Formula 1 and NASCAR to make sure the person inside isn’t harmed.
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The company is also working with DARPA Robotics Challenge second place finisher to design a new control system for the robot. Also, the arms will be modular, so guns and chainsaws, a la Army of Darkness. In the end, the robot will weigh 10 tons (four more than its predecessor), hit a top speed of 10 miles an hour and cost $2.5 million, when all is said and done.
