Toiling late into the night in a secret project room, UCLA engineering students are designing what they hope will be the ultimate fighting machine -- a robot warrior that can win this spring's Battlebots competition.

Battlebots is the top competition of "extreme robotic sports," where machines battle each other inside a 35-ton cage equipped with flamethrowers, destructive saws, hammers and spikes. It is a winner-take-all contest that usually leaves the losing robot in pieces.

Preliminary sketch of future robot warrior

"It's all about survivability and the ability to inflict damage," says Avi Okon, the team's project manager and an employee at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, whose robotics labs created the Sojourner Mars rover for NASA.

Last year, a small group of UCLA students built a robot for competition on the Learning Channel's Robotica Challenge, dubbing their creation the Boelter Beast. The 160-pound behemoth was made of aluminum and sported an intimidating "battle wedge" resembling a mouthful of long, spiked teeth. Powered by two wheelchair motors with 12-volt batteries and driven by remote control, the robot was designed and built in less than ten weeks. The team was only five points away from winning the competition.

This year more than 20 students from the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science are designing a lightweight successor to the hulking Boelter Beast, an unnamed machine that will compete in the Battlebots tournament in May. "We've got a bigger group this year and we've started sooner, so we like our chances," says robot designer Ny Sou Tang.

All of the team members are part of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), an international organization for students and professional engineers. The ASME sponsors a number of projects at the School of Engineering.

Simon Yao, a veteran of last year's Robotica challenge and president of UCLA's student chapter of ASME, feels projects like these are great opportunities for undergraduate students to test the theoretical principles they study in class, and to augment their academic studies with hands-on experience. "Working together, getting a project done on time and under budget - that's what makes these goal-oriented competitions so exciting."

The team has split into three groups, each concentrating on a specific design problem -- the weaponry, the armor and an agile drive system that will make the robot quick on the attack and hard to catch.

The robot's main weapon will be a pneumatic spike that flips opponents. To avoid being overturned itself, the UCLA robot will be equipped with defensive flaps, and the team is coming up with a way to continue fighting upside down if it is upended.

Last year, Okan was at the remote controls of the Boelter Beast during the Robotica Challenge. So who will get to control the new robot? "I'll let someone else do it this time," Okan says. "It's too much pressure!"

The metal-on-metal action is expected to air on Comedy Central in April.

-Chris Sutton