BattleBots is an American robot combat television series and company. The show is an adaptation of the American Robot Wars competitions hosted in the mid–late 1990s by Marc Thorpe, in which competitors design and operate remote-controlled armed and armored machines designed to fight in an arena combat elimination tournament. The same competitions inspired the British TV program Robot Wars, which acquired the name in 1995.

Legally barred from the name "Robot Wars", American robot combat aficionados created a new company, BattleBots, under the ownership of Greg Munson and Trey Roski. The first official BattleBots event was hosted at the Long Beach Pyramid in Long Beach, California, in August 1999, while a second event in Las Vegas was used to pitch the competition to television networks. For five seasons, BattleBots aired on the American Comedy Central and was hosted by Bil Dwyer, Sean Salisbury, and Tim Green. Comedy Central's first season premiered on August 23, 2000, and its fifth and last season ended on December 21, 2002. While small untelevised competitions continued to be run under the BattleBots name, the show was on hiatus until it was revived on ABC in 2015.

A six-episode revival series premiered on ABC on June 21, 2015, to generally favorable reviews and ratings. Additionally, ABC renewed BattleBots for a seventh season, which premiered on June 23, 2016. In February 2018, Discovery Channel and Science picked up the show for an eighth season, which premiered on May 11, 2018. A ninth season of BattleBots premiered on Discovery Channel on June 7, 2019, the tenth season premiered on December 3, 2020, the eleventh season on January 6, 2022, and the twelfth season on January 5, 2023.

Two spin-off competitions have debuted on Discovery+. The first spin-off, BattleBots: Bounty Hunters, premiered on January 4, 2021, on Discovery+. A second spin-off premiered on August 5, 2022, under the name BattleBots: Champions.

BattleBots is an offshoot of the original Robot Wars tournaments, the brainchild of Marc Thorpe. Robot Wars had financial backing from Sm:)e communications, a New York record company. The Thorpe partnership broke up in 1997, starting many years of legal wrangling between Thorpe and Profile Records (the former Sm:)e Communications). Profile licensed Robot Wars to a UK production company. Robot Wars ran from 1998 to 2004 as a popular television program in the UK, with a short-lived revival from 2016 to 2017.

The robot builders left behind in San Francisco formed BattleBots, Inc. and began a series of larger competitions. The first was held in Long Beach, California in August 1999 and streamed online, attracting 40,000 streams. Lenny Stucker, a television producer known for his work on telecasts of professional boxing, was in attendance and showed interest in being involved with BattleBots—believing the concept of robot combat was "hip" and have shown an interest in technology. Stucker made changes to the competition's format and presentation to make it more suitable for television, including elements reminiscent of boxing (such as a red and blue corner) and shifting to a single-elimination format. The creators tried selling the competition as a television series to networks such as CBS, NBC, HBO, and Showtime, but none picked it up. A second event was held as a pay-per-view in Las Vegas in 1999, the PPV was in turn, used as a pilot to pitch the show again, with a higher rate of success.

Among the networks interested was Comedy Central, who ultimately picked up the program. Debbie Liebling, the network's Senior Vice President of original programming and development, felt that the concept would appeal to the network's young adult demographic, explaining that "it was really funny and really nerdy. The Internet was not a big thing yet, so the nerd culture wasn't so celebrated. It was sports for the nerdy person, I guess." Co-creator Greg Munson viewed the deal as a double-edged sword; it gave BattleBots an outlet and a larger budget, but the network insisted on the addition of comedic aspects to BattleBots as a program, such as sketches involving contestants. However, the competition itself was not affected by this mandate; Liebling described the final product as being "a parody of a sports show without being a parody". Munson lamented that the network had also ignored his suggestion for the co-host role to be filled by "attractive geek girls" with sufficient knowledge to speak with builders, having elected to "[keep] throwing bigger and better hot babes at it", such as Carmen Electra.

Despite this, viewership and awareness of BattleBots grew progressively over time; contestants Christian Carlberg and Lisa Winter were invited to appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, BattleBots beat South Park as Comedy Central's highest-rated program for a period during Season 3, competitor interest grew and licensing deals also emerged. The success of BattleBots, however, resulted in competition from other broadcasters; TLC introduced a competing program, Robotica, while other channels imported episodes of the British Robot Wars series. By 2002, the program had begun to face further difficulties; Munson felt that the bouts had become "homogenized" because the participants had "perfected" the sport of robot fighting, leading to a lack of innovation in robot designs and strategies. Furthermore, BattleBots had sued Anheuser-Busch and its advertising agency for producing and airing a commercial during Super Bowl XXXVII that parodied the program and featured a robot greatly resembling one from BattleBots (this lawsuit, however, was dismissed in 2004, after a judge ruled that the ad was a parody protected by fair use). In September 2002, Comedy Central cancelled BattleBots after its fifth season, BattleBots 5.0. Viacom acquired full control of the network in April 2003; Stucker believed that Comedy Central had become "tired" of the program, and Roski stated that Viacom had wanted to shift Comedy Central back towards traditional comedy programming.