MIT Combat Robotics Club Rebuilds Fighting Robots That Smash and Survive in the Arena

Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spend evenings and weekends inside the Edgerton Center turning raw metal into machines built to slam into one another at high speed. The Combat Robotics Club restarted in 2023 after a quiet stretch that followed earlier members graduating during the pandemic years. Anhad Sawhney gathered a fresh group with almost no prior experience in the sport, and within months they had produced a 30-pound robot named ARES that now ranks among the stronger entries in the National Havoc Robot League.

ARES is outfitted with a powerful tool-steel beater bar that spins at an incredible 7000 revolutions per minute and can send an opponent flying across the arena upon contact. Two brushless motors drive the device via a nice little poly-V belt arrangement, and four more of the same motors power the wheels. The majority of the chassis is built of aluminum to keep it light, the high-stress shafts and brackets are titanium, and the outside armor is ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene, which sheds chunks rather than splitting and allowing the electronics to withstand a battering. The truth is that nearly every single component of ARES was cut, heat-treated, and assembled on campus using the water jet, CNC mills, and material science shops available to students.

When it comes to the history of televised robot warfare, the MIT organizations that preceded ARES made a significant impact. Uppercut, SawBlaze, the Dentist, and Overhaul may be familiar to you from BattleBots. The present crew isn’t very concerned about all of that; it’s history rather than a plan. Instead of traveling to NHRL competitions every few months, ARES has been doing well, reaching the semifinals, finishing second and third in recent rounds, and qualifying for the 2025 Worlds as a top seed. When they lost against vertical spinners with thin armor that exposed flaws in the plates, the team used that information to add more fortification for the next tournament. They also have a second robot named KRATOS, which weighs thirty pounds and works on a bespoke axial-flux motor that the members constructed and coiled themselves, allowing the weapon to reach maximum speed much faster than a stock motor would.

New students are welcomed without the need for a single day of machine shop or robotics experience. This fall, the club welcomed 54 new members who began building one-pound antweight robots in groups of three. The smaller machines still require the same types of decisions regarding weight budget, weapon type, drive layout, and battery placement, but on a scale that can be completed in a semester. Meetings are held every week to discuss topics like as CAD, finite-element checks, welding, and controller wiring. Everyone receives a piece of the robot that they will eventually drive or repair. Every November, the club holds little bouts on campus in which the antweight and beetlwight machines compete in front of other students and local builders before the larger NHRL calendar resumes.

Ryan Duarte, the team’s captain for the upcoming season, gives the rundown on what happens in the arena: each side has one goal; keep your machine operating while taking down the other. When the three-minute clock goes off, the pieces are frequently scattered around the floor, but that doesn’t mean the crew loses up. They’ll still be cleaning up what’s left of the mess, bringing it back to the pit, and beginning over on the next round of repairs.

Abi Dixon, who will take over as captain next year, says that even after a short match, you’re left with a sense of pride rather than frustration. There’s a beauty to the learning process: building a system, watching it fail under duress, and then adjusting the design until it lasts long enough to get you to the next round. That’s basically how it works: you create a system, test it, discover what breaks, then utilize the results to improve the next one.

The NHRL continues to be competitive. The on-campus house combat takes place on November 14th in the Metropolitan Warehouse. ARES and KRATOS will return for additional modifications to their armor and drive systems any day now. Meanwhile, our newest members are completing up their antweight projects. The group is available to any MIT student who wants to take their computer model and make it into something actual that can withstand a battering from another machine, and you can’t measure it by how long it lasts.
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