Battle of the Bots

The two fighters prepare to square off, as a tuxedoed ring announcer shouts into a microphone: "Ladies and gentlemen! In this corner, weighing in at 208 pounds and direct from a third-place finish at the Long Beach Pyramid -- Rhino!" The crowd of 1,700 fight fanatics, which has squeezed into All-American SportPark arena in Las Vegas, leaps to its feet and goes berserk. "And in this corner, tipping the scales at 198 pounds, trained by Los Angeles's notorious Team Sinister -- Ronin!"

A moment later, the bell sounds, and the fighters charge each other. Rhino unleashes a vicious uppercut to Ronin's midsection, and the shrieking clang of metal slamming into metal reverberates throughout the packed arena.

That's right -- metal on metal.

Rhino and Ronin are battle-tested robots, lethal and completely legal. Forget fisticuffs. Spinning saw blades and steel-splitting axes are the weapons of choice for these heavy-metal contenders. Unlike Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis, the bots' flesh-and-blood counterparts who fought just a week earlier at Vegas's Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino, a bot is never satisfied with a mere KO. The goal of every robot is to obliterate its opponent.

This, after all, is BattleBots, a single-elimination tournament that rumbles into venues as different as the SportPark in Vegas and Stanford University's basketball court. Sporting names like Tazbot and Kill-O-Amp, these mechanized fighters are hand tooled by special-effects wizards from such companies as Industrial Light & Magic and Teradyne.

Think of BattleBots as a kind of demolition derby for geeks. Working with the care and precision of a heavyweight champion's cornermen, the bot builders cart their fighters into a ring that's dubbed the "BattleBox." Ropes won't contain these robots, which can weigh nearly 500 pounds. Instead, the ring is encased in bulletproof glass, to protect the crowd from hurtling robot parts. Its floor is made of reinforced steel and is outfitted with saws whose whirling blades slice and dice any contender that's unfortunate enough to roll over them. Robot operators -- or jockeys -- stand outside the BattleBox, using lap-size remote-control units to maneuver their bots.

Rhino's prime weapon is a CO2-powered pneumatic battering ram that attacks with 14,000 pounds of hitting force -- enough power to pierce a Humvee. Hanging from the bot's backside like a malevolent tail is a 9-pound hunk of cast iron, which could tear apart a person's leg when spinning at 40 MPH. Rhino's opponent, Ronin, boasts tank-tread wheels and a two-foot-long razor that protrudes from its front.

As the two bots collide, Rhino fires its battering ram into Ronin's tread. Ronin reverses furiously and then charges, sinking its blade into Rhino's armor. But Rhino works itself loose and smacks Ronin with its blackjack of a tail, disabling one of Ronin's wheels. After three minutes of fury, the bout ends, and the three judges declare Rhino the winner.

Reason Bradley, who is 27, carts the victorious Rhino from the ring. Bradley and his partners are pleased to have notched a win, but they're disappointed about leaving Ronin in one piece. Says the burly, goateed Bradley, doing his best imitation of Muhammad Ali's doggerel: "We want to take out the opposition, so they can't get back into the competition."

What's Bradley's secret for competing successfully in the winner-take-all world of battling bots? The first step, he says, is to get in plenty of roadwork.

Rhino Starts Training Camp, Sausalito Hides Dumpsters

Prior to his championship bout in Las Vegas, heavyweight Lennox Lewis set up training camp in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains. Two weeks before BattleBots, Team Rhino sequestered its fighter in a metal shop in Sausalito, California. Although Lewis battled a succession of sparring partners, Rhino honed its ramming skills by battering a hapless Dumpster in a parking lot late at night. But here the similarity ends: Even on a bad day, Lewis is unlikely to spout motor oil and shoot sparks -- which is exactly what Rhino does when its circuits misfire.

Fortunately, Bradley, Rhino's cut man, can adeptly handle such touchy robotic temperaments. Bradley grew up next to a sprawling junkyard, and he has long been obsessed with transforming scavenged parts into big, dangerous machines. "I started out making flamethrowers," he says with a shrug, adding that Rhino's early days were fraught with risky mishaps. "A couple of times, the robot spun out at Mach 2, and we couldn't turn it off. We had to wait for the battery to die. Having so much inertia spinning around can be awfully unnerving."