Syfy's 'Robot Combat League' Makes Major Tech Dream Come True

Robot Combat League, Syfy's new reality series pitting 12 expensive, 8-feet-tall humanoid machines against each other in tournament-style face-offs, ends Tuesday night with the final two robots. And while this season lasted only three months, it has been years in the making.

"I really couldn't believe how technologically advacnced they were," Chris Jericho, the show's host and popular WWE wrestler, told Mashable. "It's like being attacked by a Terminator. If you got hit by one of these things it would literally cave your head in."

"We've never seen this before in the history of anything."

"We've never seen this before in the history of anything."

Steampunk and Crash (see image above) will battle for the show's championship in Tuesday's finale battle at 10 p.m. ET.

Throughout the tournament, teams of two humans piloted the robots: a fighter ("robo-jockey") and a robotics engineer ("robo-tech"). Fighters had varying backgrounds, including completing in the Olympics, battling as mixed martial artists and even being the daughter of filmmaker George Lucas. They used exo-suits to power their robots' movements. The engineers had experience in tech or science; one helped build NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover.

Father-daughter team Amber and Dave Shinsel, who both work at Intel, are operating finalist Crash. Kyle Samuelson, the show's youngest robo-tech and an afterschool robotics instructor, is manning Steampunk along with former beauty queen Ashley Mary Nunes.

Robot Maker Spent Years Visualizing Creations

Mark Setrakian has come along since playing with Legos, taking toys apart and putting them back together. As a boy, he drew inspiration from movies. Flash forward to adulthood and he eventually became part of the film industry that nudged him toward a career in robotics. His dreams came true and now he's turning other people's fantasies into reality.

"We're finally realizing a dream that people have had for a long time — humanoid robots fighting," Setrakian told Mashable. "My background is basically building high-tech puppets."

Setrakian built animatronics for Hellboy, Men in Black and The Grinch. He paired what he learned working on those movies with knowledge gained building robots on such TV shows as Robot Wars to the amplified "next level" as the robot creator on Robot Combat League.

"This is the most challenging project I've ever worked on."

"This is the most challenging project I've ever worked on."

"This has basically taken everything that I learned [in engineering and biology]," Setrakian added. "I've had the time of my life on this project. Shooting it in five weeks was challenging because we had to keep the robots functional throughout the series. And after each taping we had to do that over and over again."

The robots cost roughly $200,000 each, but he admits "it's hard to put a price on the robots because each one is kind of like a custom car and you keep adding all that stuff up."

Setrakian and his team were uncompromising when constructing the 12 robots.

"I made sure that everything I wanted to put in those machines got put in there for the season," he said. "But for next season, I'd like the robots to have more head movement."

Past episodes of Robot Combat League are posted on Syfy.com. The premiere attracted 1.3 million viewers, making it the network's top unscripted series premiere in two years.

"The show definitely fills a hole in the market," Syfy President Mark Stern told Mashable. "It really does break open a whole new genre, which is giant fighting robots."

Images courtesy of Syfy