Bryan Pedersen watched a video several months ago that made him think about the future of fighting. In the clip, someone kicked a robot, and the robot kicked the human back.

"I'm like, ‘We're going to fight one of these one of these days,'" said Pedersen, chair of the Wyoming Combat Sports Commission and managing director at RBC Wealth Management in Cheyenne. "Videos are coming up all the time, and regular mentions of 'fighting robots' have become part of the zeitgeist.

"It has even been brought up on Joe Rogan's podcast."

That realization has led Pedersen to draft what may be the nation's first regulatory framework for "synthetic combatants" — a term he uses to describe robots designed to compete in combat sports against each other or against human fighters.

The draft document provide

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