Sometimes, bigger is better.
Wilton native Jonathan Schultz and TEAM HUGE have taken that concept to the Discovery Channel show, BattleBots, with their aptly named robot competitor, HUGE. The seven-foot-long robot is seated on tall wheels, with a connecting center with attached blade that spins at more than 200 miles per hour, literally mowing over their competition.
“Typically, they’re like every new cell phone – they get smaller. And more optimized to attack other small things,” Schultz said. “HUGE is so tall, it puts us way out of harm’s way.”
Schultz, a long time lover of robot battle competitions, said he was inspired by a design he saw while watching some videos of other robot competitions, which had similar tall wheels, but a fairly ineffective chopping weapon.
“I thought, ‘If we could put an actual weapon on that, we’d be in business,” Schultz said. And, he said, the proof of concept came when HUGE was entered into some local competitions, where Schultz said most other competitors had no answer for how to take down the giant robot.
Schultz and his teammates Peter Lombardo, Maddie Thumma, Garrett Santoline, Don Doerfler, and Alex Horne joined dozens of other competitive teams in Long Beach, California in October to film the series, where each team had several “regular season” one-on-one fights, where either one bot definitively wins, or judges declare a victor, to narrow down a top 32 for a finals single-elimination bracket. In the past two years Schultz has competed, HUGE has made it to a top 16 spot, but went out early in the finals, losing in their first year to the eventual champion. Schultz said one of the major problems his team has faced is that while HUGE punches the competition hard, its attack style is also hard on the robot itself, causing the need for lots of repairs and sometimes catastrophic damage.
“The robot’s gotten better, more optimized, but what’s really gotten better is us,” Schultz said, of TEAM HUGE. He said the team has learned from its mistakes, gotten better about bringing needed equipment and backups, and is better able to quickly turn around repairs to get back in the game. “There’s no substitute for experience.”
Schultz, who graduated from Western New England University in 2016 with a degree in mechanical engineering, said he was a fan of BattleBots when it aired on Comedy Central when he was young, and was fascinated by the concept.
“I like it because ultimately, there are infinite strategies and paths to success,” Schultz said. “The goal is simple – you have three minutes to kill the other guy. But it’s open-ended. There’s a million ways to do it. That’s what keeps me interested.”
The show has long been a dream of his, Schultz said. This year, it almost didn’t happen at all, as production was initially delayed by the COVID-19 epidemic, and this year will only feature 60 teams, a smaller field than usual due to a lack of international competitors. Production eventually went forward, without the typical live audience, with fellow competitors becoming spectators from special “opera boxes.”
This is the team’s third year returning to the competition with a similar design, and this Thursday, it’s a battle of the bigs. When the team first entered three years ago, they were the biggest bot on the scene. But last year, a new robot named Mammoth took that title from them. The team’s first “regular season” fight this year pits the two biggest bots together.
“It’s a fight a lot of people wanted to see last year, but we just couldn’t make it happen,” Schultz said.
TEAM HUGE’s first one-on-one battle is featured on the upcoming episode of BattleBots, airing on the Discovery Channel this Thursday at 8 p.m.