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[translation mine] A US company wants to compete with the giant robot of a Japanese competitor. However, they're apparently lacking the money to complete their own battle machine. Now they're turning to patriots for help.
For the representatives of the company MegaBots, there is nothing more beautiful than robots that tear each other to pieces. "Your childhood dreams have come - can you hear them knocking?", asks the speaker in a video on Kickstarter. As though it were unthinkable, that someone could find a duel of nations in highly stylized robot battle dubious or completely superfluous. A battle advertised with slogans like "Together we can conquer Japan!"
In practice it's not about real declarations of war, but a robot duel between the US company MegaBots and the Japanese company Suidobashi Heavy Industry. At the end of July, MegaBots challenged its competitor from the Far East to pit their model named Kurata against MegaBots' Mk.II in the summer of 2016.
MegaBots is hoping to raise $500,000 on Kickstarter to fund their robot. Are they hoping for a Reality TV show?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @04:32PM
The point should be who can make the most powerful robot at the cheapest price. Sure, if the U.S. puts more money into it they can win. But it would be embarrassing if a $500 K American robot lost to a 10K Japanese robot. Then again perhaps the cost of labor in Japan is different but still. Isn't the point of having an American made device allegedly that you get better quality in exchange for paying more? Shouldn't we attempt to compete on providing more quality for the additional amount of money you spend when compared to spending the same amount of money somewhere else. Countries should try to compete on how much bang you get for your buck. This shouldn't be a war of who can build the most expensive robot and raise the most money. It should be a war of who can build the best robot given an equivalent amount of resources expended. That's where intellect comes in. Throwing more money at the problem is just brute force.
It's similar to how we compete on building more powerful processors. Yes we can always build a more powerful processor by stringing together more less powerful processors. But the metric is who can build a better processor that uses less energy (for cheaper though you want to first start out with something before making it cheaper).