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

BattleBots, which airs on Comedy Central, is the popular action-packed competition showcasing "extreme" robotic sports, where remote-controlled machines mercilessly attack each other with flamethrowers, buzzing saws, hammers and spikes inside a 35-ton cage. It is a winner-take-all contest that usually leaves the loser in pieces, ready for the junkyard. "It's all about survivability and the ability to inflict damage," said UCLA student Avi Okon, one of the robot's designers.

Last year, a few students built a robot, dubbed the Boelter Beast, for competition on the Learning Channel's Robotica Challenge. The team ended up just five points shy of winning the event.

This year, more than 20 students from the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science are designing a lightweight successor, son of the hulking 160-pound Boelter Beast, to take apart challengers in the BattleBots competition in May. The team has split into three groups to focus on specific design problems --the weaponry, 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 eight-inch-long spike that flips opponents. To avoid being overturned itself, the UCLA robot, which in an early design looked like the business end of a carpetsweeper, will be equipped with defensive flaps. Neverthe-less, if it is upended, the team is devising a way for it to continue valiantly fighting, but upside down.

Last year, Okon 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," Okon said. "It's too much pressure!"

The metal-on-metal action is expected to air on Comedy Central sometime this summer.