Season 4.0 was the fourth televised season of BattleBots on Comedy Central. It was the second of three seasons filmed at Treasure Island in San Francisco.
It proved to be the most influential season to date concerning weight rules, as shuffling robots, also known as "shufflebots", no longer received the same weight advantage as before.[1] Designs with mechanisms operated by crankshafts, rotary cams or "non-reversing rotary electric actuators" were affected by this rule, none more so than defending heavyweight champion Son of Whyachi. Although Team Whyachi would still compete with their title-winning robot, they would do so in the superheavyweight division instead. As a result, their original superheavyweight entry Whyachi was made redundant and therefore effectively retired. Though the minimum lightweight limit was increased by 5lbs, all other walker weight limits were reduced significantly across every division, with BattleBots electing to enable an allowance of exactly 20% over non-walking designs.[2]
Weight Class
Type of Robot
Wheeled Robots
Walkers
Lightweight
>25lbs - ≤60lbs
+20%
Middleweight
>60lbs - ≤120lbs
Heavyweight
>120lbs - ≤220lbs
Superheavyweight
>220lbs - ≤340lbs
Other Season 3.0 Giant Nut winners Vladiator, Hazard and Dr. Inferno Jr. all returned for another BattleBots competition. Of the three, however, only Hazard managed to defend its honor as Team Delta picked up their third middleweight title, lengthening its unbeaten streak to 14 fights. This streak has only ever been beaten since in televised competition by Bite Force, who won 19 consecutive battles from its 2016 rumble until its final appearance at the 2019 re:MARS all:STARS event.
Once again, best in show awards were presented at the end of the competition. Donald Hutson of Tazbot and Diesector won the Best Driver Award, and Tazbot also swept up the Coolest Robot Award, tied with Inertia Labs and Toro. Jascha Little's The Judge won the Best Engineering Award and M.O.E. took home the Most Aggressive Robot Award.
During the season, Comedy Central held sweepstakes titled 'It's Your Battle'. The winner would get the chance to compete with middleweight Easty Beast in Season 5.0, built by Donald Hutson of Mutant Robots. The competition was won by Lance Lyle, as announced in Episode 12 of the following season.[3]
Much like Season 3.0, robot seedings were determined by using the official BattleBots Leaderboard Rankings hosted on the original Comedy Central BattleBots website. For Season 4.0 all returning robots that had competed previously were awarded seeds. A small portion of the top seeded robots from each division were awarded byes and got to skip further into the tournament.
