The NCAA basketball tournament may be winding down, but we’re just “gearing up” to launch some of our own bracketed shenanigans. Being a friendly robot-themed website, I thought, “Hey, maybe we should put together a tournament-style bracket with nothing but robots!” The idea was naive in its conceit (Can you even name 64 different robots?), but most of The Roarbots writers were on board, and several thousand Slack messages later we can now present our brackets for March Robot Madness®!

The idea: an unknown force has destroyed all of humanity so only robots are left to roam Earth. An epic battle ensues, and only one robot can reign supreme! Being the geeks that we are, not just any robotic creation made our list. Just because it may be mechanized doesn’t mean it’s truly a robot.

• No cyborgs were able to make our list. (Sorry, Robocop.)
• It can have flesh, but that flesh must also be created.
• If the bot was created, it had to be created by a sentient being.
• Artificial intelligence was allowed but only if it had a unique container with mobility for its consciousness.
• We only permitted one robot per franchise, but pairs that operated primarily as one unit were listed together (R2-D2/C-3PO for example)

Told you we were geeky.

You’ll see that there’s quite the variety of characters, but all entries were first independently ranked 1-4 to determine their threat level:

1: A killing machine
2: A good fighter when necessary
3: Could possibly defend itself or someone else if pressed
4: Absolutely useless in a fight

After organizing by threat, we ranked the robots in each threat level and averaged individual votes by our writers to give them their seeding. I’m sure any nerd worth his or her salt will take at least some issue with our placement and have a lengthy argument at the ready, but we stand by our seeding. Take a look for yourself and finish filling out our bracket for fun.

We’ll be reporting on the outcomes of each round all this week, so be sure to follow us on social to keep up with the latest. Let us know who you think will be victorious in the comments below! With cutthroat battles like these, it’s anybody’s game!

Don’t underestimate the power of a robot with the voice of Joan Rivers!