The second match between 1.5S and StarPro began like the first. The 1.5S hero made a beeline to the island and began filling up on golf balls. But this time, instead of focusing their fire on the hero as it climbed to the island, StarPro hunted for 1.5S rovers instead. They managed to take out two of them before the 1.5S hero filled up on golf balls and made it off the island and back into combat.

The 1.5S and StarPro teams operated their robots from a small booth on the raised stage behind the battlefield. The audience could see the engineers’ faces projected onto giant screens above each team’s hut, but the players controlling the robots could not see out; the window in front of them was made of an opaque glass. This ensured that they had to navigate using the camera feed from their rovers and hero, in addition to the high-level view from their team’s drone camera.

The 1.5S hero tried again to destroy the enemy base, but it didn’t have the damage boost from the computer vision test. It ran out of ammunition, and had to head back to the island. As it returned to the battlefield, the StarPro hero drove underneath it, trapping it in limbo over the obstacle course, leaving its back wheels spinning helplessly a few inches off the ground. The crowd went wild. It was the perfect counter to the highly technical hero that had so far dominated the competition. Everything now came down to the third and final match.

The games had been running for three days straight at this point, with battles raging for 12 hours a day. The hallway surrounding the arena had been made into a makeshift camps for competitors. Engineers soldered broken parts back together, sending small plumes of smoke into the air. Others slept on the ground beside their battered bots, spare styrofoam tucked under their heads for pillows. It was clear the students were willing to work extraordinarily hard, but they were doing it on their own terms. Over the last decade young Chinese have become increasingly unwilling to embrace the brutal grind of life on the factory floor, to take the kind of manufacturing industry jobs that gave rise to Shenzhen and laid the foundation for DJI.

There was a circular irony here. To compensate for rising wages and an aging workforce, many factories are looking to automate their production, turning to the same robotic technologies at the heart of this competition. President Xi Jinping has called for a "robot revolution" and promised $200 billion in subsidies to Shenzhen’s regional province for this transition. Many young, well-educated Chinese will find work creating, controlling, and tending to these autonomous laborers at companies like DJI. Many students saw RoboMasters as a chance to move beyond the rote curriculum of their university and prepare for the more creative future.

RoboMasters began in 2013 as an internal competition, a chance for the engineers to blow off steam while still working on technology core to DJI’s business. It was small scale, held inside DJI’s office with a makeshift course. The second year, it was integrated with a summer camp DJI hosted for college-age engineers interning at the company. Last year, it opened to the public, and teams from universities across China, as well as a few teams from abroad, signed up. It began experimenting with a more lavish production, building out the battlefield with lights, music, and live announcers. It was a hit, widely covered by Chinese media, and so this year DJI went even bigger.

The company says it spent around $9 million on the 2016 tournament, although several employees told me privately that the number was closer to $15 million. Months before the finals in Shenzhen, employees fanned out across the country to help organize regional contests between 228 teams. DJI engineers produced custom components for the thousands of fighting units that competed; the company even commissioned an anime series, set to air on Chinese TV this fall, about a nerdy teen who finds his calling, and his courage, behind the wheel of a rover.

DJI must tussle with international giants like Baidu and Didi, Uber, and Amazon

Why all the effort and expense for a competition that doesn’t, at least directly, help sell any drones? The simplest answer is recruitment. As DJI forges a path forward in hardware development, it must tussle with international giants like Baidu and Didi, Uber and Amazon, all of whom want top talent in robotics, computer vision, and autonomous navigation. DJI is also setting itself up to be the default robotics platform. Almost every major robotics program at a Chinese university uses DJI’s infrastructure to educate their students. In effect, a rising generation of engineers is being trained to work on DJI products, and to think of the company’s equipment as the gold standard.

But RoboMasters is also a passion project for Frank Wang, DJI’s founder and CEO. The 36-year-old is now worth billions, and has proven himself as a brilliant engineer and a ruthless manager. But in many ways the competition is a reflection of a simple truth about Wang: he loves playing with robots — building them, flying them, and watching them fight.