Like so many epic robot battles, this one began in Tokyo, Japan. Pairs of robots stepped into a padded ring to fight, each vying for the chance to knock over and trounce their opponent. Some punched, some pushed, some just tried to stay on their feet. In the end, only one bot remained to be crowned champion of the carnge. Is the Tokyo skyline irrevocably damaged? Did millions perish in the mechanical melee? No, not this time. All the fighting robots were under one meter in height and were made from kits produced by the Kondo company who sponsored the second year of this open competition called Kondo Battle.

Kondo kits are fairly simple for robot enthusiasts, though some may contain more than a hundred individual parts. For the Kondo Battle, each robot was humanoid in shape, but the wide range of available parts allowed for a good variation in size and strategy. I was impressed by the relative steady movement the gyros and stabilizers could produce, especially during fights where a bot managed to defeat an opponent without taking its own tumble.  Check out an overview of the intense robot-on-robot action in this news brief from IDG news services:

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