THE world famous Robot Wars will have a Melksham presence as a group of friends and work colleagues have put their heads together to create their very own robot.

Melksham mechanical engineers, Martin Gutkowski, 39, Richard Johnstone, 39, Alex May, 26 and Roy Harris, 26, will appear on the rebooted show with their creation, Draven.

Their creation, which has a weapon of a crushing a lifting draw and was built in Mr Gutkowski's garage, will be one of 40 amateur robot fighting enthusiast teams will battle it out to become Robot Wars Champion.

"If you think about it in terms of Formula 1 and all the rules and regulations that govern what you can and can’t do. That is because if they didn’t have those rules people would die," he said.

"In Robot Wars no one’s in danger of dying, so people can go mad and create what they like. You can basically let your imagination go crazy.

"We are all friends and we have all share the same aim – to get the robot working, put it in the arena and see if it is any good."

Draven’s jaw acts as a crusher and can grip with a force of four tonnes and it is made from aerospace grade titanium, and its chassis and bodyshell is a carbon-kevlar composite.

It's jaws allow it to self-right and will roll itself back over if inverted by another robot and it weighs 110kg has a top speed of 15mph.

Mr Gutowski added: "We went through four different versions of Draven, which came from the character Eric Draven in the 1994 film, the Crow, before deciding on the finished one. One of the things about building a robot is there are no manuals out there telling what to do.

"I would say our weakness is our armour but on the plus side we have a very powerful drive and weapon. It is a dangerous machine so we used a local carpark to test it."

For each of the six episodes, hosted by comedian Dara O Briain and presenter Angela Scanlon and commentated on by Jonathan Pearce, eight robots will go to war in a huge, purpose-built fighting arena in Glasgow.

The action starts with two group battles with four robots in each battle. The top two robots from each group battle go through to head to head battles where all four robots fight each other once.

The top two then compete in the episode final – the winner going through to the Grand Final.

As well as battling it out against each other, the robot teams must avoid the iconic and intimidating House Robots such as Sir Killalot, Matilda, Shunt and Dead Metal show no mercy as they menacingly patrol the arena ready to destroy.

The episode will be shown on Sunday (July 31) on BBC2 at 8pm.