BY SANDY BUI
Bruin contributor
sbui@media.ucla.edu
With its 12-pound steel bar spinning rapidly, the UBRuined robot can shred other robots apart ruthlessly. With a steel cylinder edged with teeth in front, the UCLASH robot spins while storing enough energy to attack its next enemy.
BattleBots, UCLA’s American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ student project, has about 45 student members designing and building robots to compete in robotic fighting competitions.
These elaborate machines are the creations of committed robot enthusiasts who are simultaneously gaining hands-on experience with engineering and with battling in competitions.
Members of the BattleBots club “come up with an idea, put it on paper, create a 3-D model, and go in and build it and compete,” said Alexander Jozefov, a second-year mechanical engineering student who serves as co-project leader of BattleBots and as UCLA’s ASME president.
Jeff O’Donohue, a fifth-year mechanical engineering student and co-creator of the BattleBots club, started it during his second year at UCLA with other engineering students.
Before becoming affiliated with ASME, the club built its first robot called DracUCLA and competed in the RoboGames competition about three years ago.
The club attracts students from not only the mechanical engineering department, but also computer science and non-technical departments as well. Club members, who are divided into teams to create robots, are currently in the design process.
For the first half of the school year, the students plan and design their robots. In the second half, they construct their robots.
The students blend creativity, craft and school spirit into their inventions. According to the Robot Fighting League’s national rankings, UBRuined is currently ranked 10th and Bruiner of Worlds is ranked 11th, Jozefov said.
The Robot Fighting League ranks robots according to their weight class and performance at events from the last 18 months.
BattleBots welcomes any interested students to join. However, students must have the commitment to go through each step of the process. Though competing is fun, it is not the most important part of BattleBots, O’Donohue said.
“You’ve got to be the kind of person who likes not only the three-minute match in the arena, but also the six months of designing and building because, if you’re completely focused on the end result, you might not build as good of a robot to really enjoy the design and the build process just about as much as the competition,” O’Donohue said.
The weeks before competition are more intense as the students go to the student shop and put the finishing touches on their robots.
“The competition is like the culmination, and you get to see everyone else’s robot and what everyone else designed,” O’Donohue said.
Whether or not battling robots will have a practical use in the future is not certain, but robots in general are expected to have an influential effect on society.
“(Robots are) just going to become more important in society ““ not as robots fighting robots, obviously, but whether they’re integrated into cars, (or) other hospital machinery,” O’Donohue said.
Regardless of the robots’ practicality, students are more importantly engaging and learning from hands-on projects in a student-run club.
“I don’t think (BattleBots) was some really elaborate scheme to build something great for humanity,” O’Donohue said.
“You’re just doing it to show that you can do it. More importantly, you’re learning how to do it. So for a student organization like ours, (members) are learning because they really want to know how to design and build stuff. It’s like a niche of the student projects, (and) it’s not something that you take a class on until much later on,” O’Donohue said.
Students are currently preparing for their upcoming competitions in April and June. ESPN will televise the collegiate BattleBots competition, which will be held in Northern California in April. The club is currently rebuilding DracUCLA for this competition.
At the end of spring quarter, students will head to San Francisco for RoboGames, an international competition that attracts student competitors, hobbyists, families and even professional engineers from around the world.
Entering the RoboGames competition will be DracUCLA and UBRuined, along with UCLASH, which Phil Qian, second-year mechanical engineering student and BattleBot’s co-project leader, is working on.
According to SERVO, a magazine that highlights personal robotics, the RoboGames competition will have an new arena designed as a polycarbonate glass house. There will also be one-inch polycarbonate sheets surrounding the arena to keep flying robotic pieces within the boundaries.
Jozefov said the competitions are especially entertaining and exciting.
“You go to competition, you’ll be repairing your “˜bot, and you hear a loud clash from across the room. And you go running over to the arena to watch these two robots duking it out, and in some cases, parts go flying everywhere,” he said.
Matches end when one robot stops functioning, also known as a “knock out.” If neither robot crashes, then a panel of judges determines the victorious robot.
Winners not only receive a cash prize, but also “a lot of bragging rights,” Qian said.
Students involved with BattleBots are gaining knowledge that cannot be offered in academic courses until much later. “It’s a really fun way to learn about engineering,” O’Donohue said.
Nonetheless, the educational aspect of the club is not the best part of BattleBots. “Nobody’s going say they don’t like seeing robots be destroyed,” Jozefov said.
Students who are interested should visit the club’s Web site at
asme.seas.ucla.edu.