Rock ’em sock ’em? We got ’em

Two giant, menacing robots march toward each other, blasting missiles and six-inch projectiles at over 100 mph ...

No, it's not science fiction, it's what a Somerville company plans on making reality.

Part Transformers, part blockbuster movie "Real Steel" come to life, MegaBots is launching a Kickstarter campaign today to help fund the production of robots that would take ultimate fighting to a whole new dimension.

For a cool $1 million, MegaBots will build and deliver to your doorstep a customized robot, sporting your favorite colors. The company is also offering sponsored robots, for $10,000.

"We're kind of fulfilling our childhood fantasies," said Andrew Stroup, one of MegaBots' co-founders. "We grew up with robots."

"Fifteen-foot, 15,000-pound, two-legged walking robots that have two people inside, to fight each other in an arena," Stroup said. "They're in giant robots, stomping around, shooting each other."

In one scenario, as many as eight robots share the battleground in a metal-on-metal, last-robot-standing brawl straight out of a futuristic apocalypse.

"We're creating a new sports league around it," Stroup said. "Why hasn't this happened yet? The technology's here, the demand for new entertainments sports, too. We just don't know why robots don't exist in our everyday lives."

If all goes as Stroup and his sidekicks plan, their robo-league will kick off in early 2016.

The robots will duke it out to their robot deaths, with limbs falling off in a burst of pyrotechnics after the droid has sustained too much damage. MegaBots said the limbs can be reattached, so the company doesn't have to put 15,000 pounds of scrap metal out on the curb with the office trash.

Launched with the backing of an angel investor, MegaBots will build as many robots as it can with the $1.8 million they hope to raise via Kickstarter, and has already started talking to potential venues to host battles.

The bots, lumbering on six-foot-long feet, are operated by a pilot and a "gunner," who controls the weapons system on each arm. The puny humans are completely safe, Stroup insisted, using the same safety standards as NASCAR.

Stroup and co-founder Matt Oehr­lein moved to Somerville five months ago to work on Mega­Bots with the third co-founder, Gui Cavalcanti, who founded Artisan's Asylum in Somerville.

The three roboticists gave up their "day jobs" to launch MegaBots.

"It always sounds crazy to us," Stroup said. "You wake up, you put on your welding mask and you go to work, and every weld you lay down is building a piece of a giant fighting robot."

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