The ''Critter Crunch'' is a table top combat robot competition that takes place annually at the

MileHiCon MileHiCon is an annual science fiction and fantasy convention held in Denver, Colorado in October. It is primarily literary, although it also has an art show, a vendors' room, Critter Crunch (similar to '' Robot Wars''), Critter Float-illa (rob ...

science fiction convention. Established in 1986 with the first competition held in 1987, it is widely accepted as the first

combat robot Robot combat is a mode of robot competition in which custom-built machines fight using various methods to incapacitate each other. The machines have generally been remote-controlled vehicles rather than autonomous robots. Robot combat compet ...

competition. In the months before the 1987 convention the club produced a set of rules which were distributed without copyright restriction, allowing other organizations use or extend them for their own competitions. The first competition was held on a hotel table. The original rules prohibited damaging the surface. There were several competitors including a remote control dune buggy, a mechanical device under a steel mixing bowl, and a little yellow remote control corvette that could only go forward or backwards and turn. The first competition was won by the corvette. The last revision to the official rules was on 15 Feb 2003. By then the rules had evolved to include mention of radio controls, attacking control systems, limiting the number of operators to one, and codifying two part critters loss conditions
MileHiCon 38 Website, Internet Archive (accessed 19 February 2015).

References

{{reflist Robotics events Robotics competitions Robot combat competitions