【2011 Archives】

Seriously011 Archives don't flinch. Canadian VR developer Robert McGregor has put together six years of Japanese sumo robots fighting each other in a single video.

The robots are programmed to push their opponents out of the ring, like regular sumos, but they barely take a minute to pause, going right into the action:

Naturally, these heartless robots don't seem to care about whether their opponents are utterly wrecked.

There's even a tiny femto-class of sumo robot fighting:

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McGregor told Mashablethat the video has a mixture of remote-controlled robots and autonomous robots battling one another.

Remote-controlled robots would usually have an antenna. "Occasionally brave RC pilots will take on autonomous opponents," McGregor said.

Some of the autonomous robots appear to use range-finding by shining a red laser dot on their opponents, McGregor added.

People were instantly amazed.

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McGregor, who compiled the footage from 2011 to 2017, told Mashablethat he's seen a "sharp inflection" in the speed of the autonomous sumo robots, as processing power and motor speeds improve.

"The speeds at which the autonomous bots react is now well beyond what can be reasonably expected of even a very skilled human RC controller," he added. "It is getting very affordable to pack some impressive levels of processing power into a bot."

"The future is autonomous."

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