The moment Dude Perfect‘s confetti cannons fired and Tyler Toney declared victory over a crumpled, armless, mustache-shaved Cyber Tank, Mark Rober was already smiling. Five robots, one engineer, and a warehouse that would need new drywall before the day was over: this was the most elaborate robot battle either side had ever attempted, with the added humiliation that the loser had to let the winner redecorate their entire headquarters. The trash talk started before a single wheel turned, and the carnage that followed was roughly as dignified as anyone had a right to expect.
Five bots versus one, and someone brought a flamethrower
Cody Jones opened the bracket with an R2-D2 build that arrived with its own problem: it was too tall to fit through the arena door. Once that was sorted, Cody activated a taser system and a squirt gun in an attempt to short-circuit the Cyber Tank. What the dudes did not know was that the Cyber Tank is waterproof, and that its decorative steel mustache was actually a nine-pointed, razor-sharp ramming bayonet on a motorized quarter-inch steel cable retraction system. The ruse of a live squirrel inside R2-D2 briefly halted the Cyber Tank under a temporary Geneva Conventions interpretation, but when Cody used the ceasefire to take a cheap shot and missed, the bayonet went back to work. Round one was not close.
The twins, Coby and Cory Cotton, brought a two-robot pincer: one armed with laser-guided retractable harpoons, the other carrying four angle grinders and an aerial glitter-bomb drone loaded with glitter-infused black powder. What they did not know was that Rober had placed a drone in a servo-actuated box the week before, disguised as a delivery, and used overnight aerial recon of Dude Perfect headquarters to anticipate exactly this plan. His countermeasure was a set of anti-drone tassels powered by four 24-volt leaf blowers. When the drone launched, the tassels ate it. When the harpoon finally lodged in a Cyber Tank tire and the twins tried to reel him in Star Wars style, basic physics intervened: the Cyber Tank outweighed the harpoon bot, so retracting the line just dragged the twin straight into the War Hammers, a pair of 24-volt DC motors each capable of delivering over 1,000 pounds of force. The twins did eventually corner the Cyber Tank against a wall and angle-grind off one of its arms, which is when Rober deployed a fake battery he had bribed a Dude Perfect team member to plant in their driving box before the match. The battery dispensed fart spray. ‘You got to do what you got to do,’ Rober said, and with the arena briefly uninhabitable, round two concluded.
Garrett Hilbert’s Purple Dozer arrived looking modest and then opened with a flamethrower, melting tires and warping the Cyber Tank’s googly eyes until the structure started going soft. Rober’s answer was a 10-pound bottle of liquid CO2 at 800 psi released through a cryogenic solenoid valve. The fire lost. Nail guns came next, and the Cyber Tank lost both War Hammer arms taking them out one by one, finishing the last with only the steel mustache bayonet. Then Garrett offered Rober the honor of pressing his robot’s self-destruct button in person. ‘I’m nothing if not a very curious individual,’ Rober admitted. ‘I can’t not push the button.’ The explosion buried the Cyber Tank under a pool table.
The robot inside the robot nobody knew about
Tyler Toney’s final bot arrived with a 30-pound swinging axe and a 63-pound steel slug on the front spinning at a max of 4,500 RPMs. It dismantled what was left of the Cyber Tank piece by piece, shaved the mustache off for good measure, and set off the confetti. The ref had not called it yet.
Rober hit a button. A trapdoor opened. A second robot, Fat Tail, rose out of the Cyber Tank’s wreckage. Fat Tail carries a 16-pound flywheel spinning at 3,600 RPM connected to two solenoids that clutch against the flywheel, twist a bundle of cords shorter through a rack-and-pinion mechanism, and drive the nose upward with enough force to launch a 250-pound payload 20 feet into the air. In testing, the anvils it launched damaged solid wood ceiling beams in Rober’s shop. In the arena, it launched Tyler’s robot. Then it launched it again. Referee Sparky called a TKO.
The confetti that came back to haunt them
The final image from the battle was not Fat Tail or the Cyber Tank.
Full-Circle Wrap: It was Tyler, Garrett, Coby, Cory, and Cody, paint rollers in hand, working over the walls of their own warehouse while Rober pointed out spots they had missed. ‘We’re doing our best, Mark,’ Tyler said. ‘We’re not painters.’ The Cyber Tank, shaved and armless, sat somewhere in the wreckage behind them.
