Are robots set to take over the combat ring for good?

THE robot fighters were ready. So were their human pilots. Recently, inside Pavilion Kuala Lumpur, a battle ring became an unlikely stage for a glimpse of Malaysia's possible robotic future.

For more than three hours, New Dawn Malaysia — the latest live event by Shadow Combat League — brought humans and machines together in a spectacle that was part combat, part technology showcase and part experiment in what the future of robotics could look like.

Visitors watched humanoid robots go head-to-head and even had the chance to step into the action themselves, controlling the machines through virtual-reality headsets and motion-capture technology.

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"We recently had a Malaysian comedian who was 150kg fight against a petite female influencer. Would that ever happen in real life? Never, right?" asks Shadow Combat League founder Ian Tan. "But they fought using the robots as proxies."

It's an encounter that captures the thinking behind the league: take something as instinctively human as competition and combat, remove the physical danger and let technology become the intermediary.

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Tan and fellow entrepreneur Ooi Fei Hoong are not simply trying to create another form of entertainment. They're attempting to build what they see as the beginnings of a robotics ecosystem in Malaysia, starting — rather unexpectedly — in the fighting ring.

If you think about it, robots have always been part of our lives.

They may not have physically interacted with us as we were growing up, but the idea of them has long occupied our collective imagination — as threatening usurpers, loyal companions or mechanical extensions of ourselves.

Now, these two Malaysians want to bring that fascination into the real world.

The idea is simple, if futuristic: instead of stepping into the ring themselves, fighters control machines that mirror their movements. Every punch, block, slip and manoeuvre can be captured as data and fed into artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

The result is a form of combat in which the spectacle remains, but the physical danger is removed.

And for Tan and Ooi, that fighting ring is only the start.

UNMECHANICAL BEGINNINGS

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Given their passion for robotics, it would be easy to assume that both men have spent years immersed in the field.

In reality, Tan and Ooi come from backgrounds far removed from robots — or combat — in any shape or form.

Long before he founded Shadow Combat League and began dreaming up robot battles, Tan was a medical doctor by training. It is, on the surface, an unlikely path to the fighting arena he is now building.

Tan earned his medical degree between 2004 and 2010. But after graduating, the 41-year-old found himself moving away from clinical medicine and towards gaming, esports, entrepreneurship and decentralised technology — a journey that led him to a very different kind of arena.

Yet medicine isn't something he sees as entirely separate from what he's doing today.

"I'm a medical doctor. I still want to heal patients," shares Tan.

That instinct to understand how things work — and how they respond under pressure — has stayed with him.

While his current work may seem far removed from medicine, Tan believes his medical training continues to influence the way he approaches robotics.

In particular, his understanding of biomechanics, or how the human body moves and responds, has given him an appreciation of movement, balance and physical interaction — considerations that are equally important when creating machines designed to move, react and behave in ways that feel increasingly human.

For Tan, the leap from medicine to robotics may not be as wide as it first appears. The tools and environments are different, but the curiosity about movement, function and the human body remains a thread connecting the two worlds.

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Ooi comes from a background that's just as varied, spanning gaming, fundraising, operations and sport.

Part of his childhood was spent in Hollywood, where he travelled with his father, who worked in the film industry. It was an early introduction to a world built around entertainment and spectacle, although Ooi's own path would take him through very different arenas.

He later became involved in Olympic weightlifting, moving into coaching before making his way into gaming. The experiences may appear disparate, but each brought him into environments where performance, competition and the pursuit of improvement were central.

In 2024, he helped raise US$3 million for a gaming company.

By the end of last year, however, his attention had begun to shift towards robotics. For Ooi, it wasn't simply another technological trend. He saw it as the beginning of a new era, one that could bring together many of the worlds he'd encountered.

Says Ooi: "I've always been interested in robots since I was a kid. We grew up watching animations and playing video games."

That childhood fascination never really disappeared. If anything, Ooi says, it became more compelling as technology caught up with the kinds of robots he'd grown up imagining.

Gaming, adds Ooi, had also become increasingly saturated. Robotics, by contrast, offered a new frontier — one where entertainment, sport, technology and data could intersect, creating possibilities that were still largely unexplored.

It was this sense of possibility that drew him towards the idea of robot combat: not simply as a spectacle, but as a space where technology could be tested, experienced and enjoyed by an audience in a completely different way.

FIGHTING BY PROXY

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The big idea, however, isn't simply about making robots fight for spectacle. Rather, the fighting league is an appetiser for something much bigger — a way of introducing people to robotics in a form that's immediately understandable and — importantly — emotionally engaging.

"Everyone is talking about AI now. Robotics will be like that in the very near future," says Tan.

For now, the fighting league is the public-facing element of a much larger ambition. Tan sees it as a way of making robots feel more familiar, easing people into a future where the technology could become a more visible part of everyday life.

Like service robots in restaurants, for example. Their presence, Tan believes, is proof that once the novelty wears off, the machine simply becomes part of the environment.

"Our idea is to ease the public into accepting robots," he says simply.

Ooi is confident the idea will resonate with the public, precisely because the league sits at the intersection of humans and machines. The robot isn't an autonomous character operating independently, but an expression of the person controlling it.

Elaborating on the idea, he points to the enduring fantasy of seeing legendary fighters such as Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali face one another — something that would be impossible in real life.

But by recording human movement and transferring that data to robots, the pair believe they can create a version of those imagined confrontations without anyone getting hurt.

"What if we were able to get that data, infer that into robots and have them dish it out? There's not going to be any human harm in that way, or anyone getting hurt," says Ooi.

And what's more, the technology could make combat more accessible. You don't have to be a professional athlete, physically imposing or even experienced to take part. In theory, anyone can put on a headset and control a machine.

The robot becomes an intermediary — a physical proxy through which people can compete without exposing their own bodies to the same level of risk.

WHERE'S THE EMOTION?

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Without the physical risks and raw emotions of conventional combat, could that dilute the appeal of the league?

Combat sports have traditionally depended, at least in part, on physical risk. The blood, bruises, exhaustion and very real possibility of injury are woven into the drama, giving audiences a visceral sense of what's at stake.

Remove those elements and a natural question follows: what, exactly, are spectators cheering for?

For Tan and Ooi, the answer lies not in the machines themselves, but in the people behind them.

"The robots themselves are just the expression of the humans that are piloting them," remarks Ooi.

That distinction is central to how they see the sport. The fights are not scripted performances in which machines simply go through a predetermined sequence of movements. They're live contests, shaped in real time by the decisions, instincts, reactions and abilities of the human pilots controlling them.

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A robot may take the hits, but it's a person on the other side of the controls who has to decide when to attack, defend, take a risk and respond when a strategy begins to unravel.

In that sense, the technology becomes an extension of the pilot's physical capabilities. The machine may be made of metal, motors and electronics, but the competitive instinct behind it remains distinctly human.

The audience isn't simply watching a robot make decisions in isolation. It's watching a human being think, react, strategise and compete through a machine — with the outcome determined not only by what the robot can do, but by what its pilot can make it do.

The drama may look different from that of a conventional combat sport, but the underlying human element remains: two competitors, each trying to outthink and outmanoeuvre the other, with only the machine standing between their decisions and the consequences.

A CATEGORY OF ITS OWN

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Perhaps that's why the pair are quick to reject the suggestion that their league could ever replace boxing, mixed martial arts or other traditional forms of fighting.

Says Tan: "Blood sports will always be here to stay. That's just human nature. If not, we'll be out of action movies."

There is, however, another distinction they're mindful of — the limits of what robotics and AI can achieve today.

For Tan, machines have not yet reached a point where AI can replicate the depth of human understanding, particularly when it comes to things that cannot be reduced to logic or data.

Logic, he says, isn't the same as empathy, compassion or lived experience.

An AI system may be able to generate a response that appears sympathetic or compassionate, but that doesn't necessarily mean it understands the emotion behind those words, or has experienced anything that gives that response genuine human meaning.

"There's just not enough data," he argues.

For all the advances in AI and robotics, Tan believes there remains a fundamental gap between being able to process information and understanding what it means to be human.

And perhaps that gap is precisely where the human element of their vision continues to matter most.

STARTING POINT

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For now, though, it remains a minor hurdle. Tan and his team believe technology will eventually catch up, taking Shadow Combat League towards something far bigger than a robot-fighting competition. The ambition isn't simply to grow the league, but to use it as a springboard for robotic automation across different fields.

As the robots learn from human movement, the data generated through their training and battles could eventually have applications far beyond the ring, helping inform the development of robots for other disciplines.

The possibilities, they believe, are limited largely by what people can imagine and build.

The pair have even toyed with the idea of creating a physical replica of a famous athlete, such as badminton great Lee Chong Wei, which could one day serve as a training partner for Malaysia's national shuttlers.

"Our national shuttlers will be able to train against it at least eight hours a day," enthuses Tan. The image is certainly compelling: a robotic version of one of Malaysia's greatest badminton stars waiting on court whenever the national players need a sparring partner.

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And there's an ambition closer to home, too.

As Malaysians, Tan and Ooi want the country to be more than simply a market for finished technology.

They believe Malaysia has the potential to build and nurture its own robotics ecosystem — one that starts here, develops local talent and ideas, and perhaps, eventually, reaches far beyond its borders.

From the looks of it, they're already putting that belief into motion.

Their recent New Dawn Malaysia event offered Malaysians a glimpse of what that future might look like: machines that can fight, humans who can control them and technology that's no longer confined to laboratories or science-fiction screens.

But perhaps the larger experiment isn't what the robots can do. It's what humans might learn to do with them. After all, beneath the AI and robotic bodies lies something distinctly human: skill, strategy, imagination and the instinct to evolve.

Robotics, in many ways, is simply an extension of ourselves. And as long as our curiosity remains alive and our desire to grow continues to push us forward, there'll always be new ways for humanity to extend itself.