In a tucked-away San Francisco warehouse, four humanoid robots hang out — quite literally, from standalone frames — as they wait for their flesh-and-blood overlords to train them to kill.
As reporter and writer Ashlee Vance writes on his Substack Core Memory, this entirely robotic fight club is known as REK, and is operated by virtual reality entrepreneur and fighting robot enthusiast Cix Liv.
With one big robot battle win under his belt from San Francisco’s Ultimate Fighting Bots (UFB) league, Liv has already begun taking cues from mixed martial arts, pro wrestling, anime, and science fiction to create something that is part sport and part theater.
Using his decade-long background in VR, Liv envisions REK as a place where human “pilots” donning headsets and arm-worn “combat controllers” as they enter the virtual fighting ring. These pilots activate the movements of robots remotely that will hit, punch, slap, and even cut each other up with swords.
Though he’s got the VR bona fides, Liv still has a lot of work to do. As he told Vance, REK has already begun training artificial intelligence models on videos of fighting moves that will, hopefully, convert into actual choreography for the robots in the ring.
“This is going to be the next [Ultimate Fighting Championship],” Liv told Vance. “When [my robot is] walking around and he has full swords, you can feel the pounding in the ground. You know deep in your soul that this thing could kill you. It’s like when you see a lion or something and the hairs go up on the back of your neck.”
“Once people can really feel this and see this,” he continued, “it’ll be fully mainstream.”
Unfortunately, those lofty ambitions may not be quite ready for fruition.
Last month, the self-proclaimed “chief robot fighter” posted an eyebrow-raising video on X showing his “humanoid robot boyDeREK” trashing around violently.
Eventually, DeREK’s frenetic freak-out became so intense, it caused the crane the robot was hanging from to plummet — and apparently, for part of its head to fly upwards once it hit the ground.
As Liv told Vance, the robot’s tantrum seemed to be caused by something almost human: the feeling of one’s feet not touching the ground, resulting in, well, a bunch of thrashing.
Because it could not “depend on its usual stability mechanisms,” as Vance put it, DeREK did the next best thing: it flailed around until it fell over, causing Liv and Amanda Watson, REK’s chief technology officer, whose voice was heard off-camera in the video, to back away from the out-of-control bot.
“Poor [DeREK] just wants to be free,” Watson joked of the robot, who, per her own headcanon, is more of a lover than a fighter.
Though REK is far from the first company looking to build fighting robots — that distinction generally is conferred upon BattleBots, the late-1990s show and competition where robotics nerds got to show off their skills in building dangerous fighting machines — this bot-based fight club boasts passion and…
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