Dekinnoka 11 Robot Pro Wrestling Tournament

The “Dekinnoka! 11” Robot Pro Wrestling tournament (ロボットプロレス　できんのか！１１) will take place in Soka City, Japan on November 3rd.  Dekinnoka is an entertaining, more light-hearted humanoid robotics tournament than, say, Robo-One, though it brings out many of the same competitors.  Taking some lessons from American pro wrestling, each robot in the tournament is given a complete character, with an impressive-sounding name and backstory, to further engage the audience.

The format and rules of the tournament are simple.  Eight robots compete, each starting out with a large machine screw in a jar.  Robots face off in pairs; the winner of each bout is the one that knocks its opponent down, or pushes it out of the ring.  The winner takes all the loser’s screws.  At the end, one robot will end up with all eight screw jars, allowing its builder to invoke Nejiron, God of Screws, for a divine favor.

This boils down to a simple eight-contestant single-elimination tournament, as far as I can tell, but props go to the conference organizers for making even the mechanics fun and entertaining.

I’ll post any photos and videos I can find of the tournament here after it happens.  Meanwhile, for more details, see the excellent write-up at Biped Robot News Japan.