Robo Equality Party

The Robot Revolution is here. Joe Alterio is covering it live.

Boy are those little critters gonna be sorry they messed with him!

Suicide Bot Buddy Attaboy is having one of his patented YArt sales in San Francisco this Saturday! Atty will be taking his pent up aggression out on all his artwork by selling it. Yes! He will punish his art work by parting with it and will pass the savings on to you!

From Attaboy:

Attaboy’s YArt Sale
The Dark Room
Sat, Oct.21st
12am-4pm
FRee!

Its Attaboy’s infamous YArt Sale drawing show. Over 500 original drawings from the past six years from Attaboy. All different. Each table and area will have its price indicated, there will be tables ranging from $10, $20 and up. 90% of the art is under $50. Some higher priced recent art will also be available.

Here’s your chance to get the original, often with notes, scribbles, phone numbers, and lymirics never intended to be seen by anyone. Your phone number may be on one of them so you had better get it.

There’s no waiting. You like it, you throw down the dough, you take it home. Attaboy cries like a baby while eating food he bought with your money. Make him sad and fat. Come to the YArt sale. Attaboy will be there to sign and personalize all art for you and say goodbye to his two dimensional children as they are sold to the brats from uptown with real jobs.

Doors will open at 12 pm. and viewers can peruse the selection of rare to well done drawings, paintings,and images. Get there on times as at 12:15 a siren will sound and people can grab the art they want, pay for it, and be headed out the door, fullfilled.

This is a string cheese and cracker jack affair and your special guests Jim Fourniadis and Ty McKenzie will create a musical soundtrack for your bargain buying just for you.

Attaboy’s limited edition toys, stickers, books, and other goods will also be available.
Some one of a kind samples as well. Lookout.

Venue:
The DarkRoom
2263 Mission Street
San Francisco
(415)401-7987
(between 18th & 19th) in Sf
on Mission
Very close to BARt

“But SB!” I hear you cry, “What in Bob’s name does this have to with robots? Could this be just some blatantly nepotistic posting of a friend’s event, purely to abuse your power and inflate your ego?”

Well, Maybe.

However! Attaboy, along with the inestimable Mr. Burke, are secretly the masters of a vast intergalactic robot breakdancing conspiracy!

Click the photo, puny human, you are no match for 1000 Robots!

OK, so you missed the 2006 Chinese robot expo. There’s still a chance to use that frequent flier coupon!

Robot World 2006 in Korea was organized jointly by seven institutions, including the Korea Association of Robotics, and the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy (MOCIE). 26 kinds of new robots and 110 manufactured robots will be shown – along with the other usual fun stuff.

Most noteworthy is that they’re stealing my ideas and having a robot competiton. The event has 3 different portions: ‘International Robot Industry Show 2006,’ ‘International Robot Contest 2006,’ and ‘Korea Robot Conference 2006,’ respectively. I’ll update you with photos after the event.

Our Man On The Coast, Douglas Irving Repetto, forwards us this information about a li’l shindig he’s working on as part of the science + art festival:

ArtBots is very happy to announce a regional NYC show as part of the science+art festival 2006 this fall. The show will feature works old and new by eight New York artists and groups who have appeared in previous ArtBots shows.

When: Thursday-Sunday November 9-12, 2006, Noon-6pm
Opening reception Thursday November 9th, 6-8pm
Where: Location One (26 Greene Street (between Canal and Grand) – New York City!)
How much: $$$FREE$$$
Who: you!

Participants:

Neil and Iona – Mixed Feelings
Jason Van Anden
Robozoic
Brett Doar
Retrospectrum
Yoav Bergner and LoVid
(Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus)
Ill-Tempered Clangier
Bob Huott & Eric Singer
fabrication by Kazuyo Inoue, Kell Condon, Rocio Barcia, Roberto Osorio, Goenaga, Jesse Fox, Aidan Collins, Gregory Boland, Leif Krinkle, Jonathan Zalben, Ajay Kapur
It’s In the Air!
Mark Esper
Wheeze
Ranjit Bhatnagar
Wildflower Meadow Glacier
James Powderly
IPO Madness
Jonah Brucker-Cohen

If you are in the NYC this is a don’t-miss, a must-see, a blockbuster, a raging robotic juggernaut into the field of art and design, a majestic interlude of mechanically titanic proportions, a. . .well you get the idea.

. . .Ah, screw it.” said the Wolf.

In terms of sheer supervillain awesomeness, this little toy completely wins. Let’s all congratulate the “scientists”, who are “engaged” in “scientific” “research” on “hurricanes”.

Another group of scientists I know should exchange information and investigate further applications.

[via Core 77's blog, thank you Alexander Rose!]

Most people who know robots, know the Turk. It was supposedly a chess-playing automaton that beat Napolean and others. It wasn’t actually an automaton. It actually held a chess master (William Schlumberger) in a secret compartment who played the robot.

But fiction often leads to fact. Thus we have El Ajedrecista.

Built in 1912 by Leonardo Torres y Quevedo, the machine used magnets to move the pieces around the board and detect the human players moves. It proved to be an excellent chess player, winning all of the games it played in King/Rook vs. King endgame. So it’s not a full game, but it did always win – never even getting a forced draw.

What’s remarkable about this, is that this was in 1912. And for those of you who don’t pay much attention to history, the microchip hadn’t been invented yet. Big Blue wasn’t around, Gary Kasparov was still a gleam in his grandfather’s eye, and yahoo games were something played by the uncool kids in a parking lot with a deflated soccer ball. This was an all analog, all mechanical computer that kept track of the input of the player, controlled the output of all the pieces, and mechanically kicked your ass.

Your weakness sickens me. I’m going out for a cup of 30 weight.

We’re going to try something.

Our Kamikaze Droids will go to Flickr or GoogleImages each day, and grab a pseudo-random photo. Who knows if this will last or even be interesting (I do know that there’s no way we’ll actually keep it up every day.) When we do post a photo, it should always lead to somewhere/something at least moderately diversionary.

Evil Robots

Robot Workman Assembled in 90 Days

To the astute futurists of 1953 it had already become clear that the future of manufacturing would soon involve highly automated mechanized assembly plants. These plants would be populated by robotic workers who would arrive at the factory right on schedule every day, without hangovers, place their robotic lunchboxes in their lockers in the break room, punch the clock and walk over to the tool rack, grab their soldering irons and get right to work.

At 5:00, they would get in their cars and return to the suburbs, where they would spend the evening with their robotic families.

[via FinkBuilt]

OK, so you’re too lazy to make a robot yourself.

But you like halloween.

And you surf the net all day long.

Cube potato, meet tele-skeleton:

Click the photo to go to the Tele Toyland website and tele-operate the six foot tall robotic skeleton.

In real time.

No really.

Welcome dedicated readers of Angela Gunn, who was ever so nice and gave us a lovely mention on the USA Today site today.

Also please note the shiny new Feedburner RSS link over yonder in the sidebar. It’s all kinds of compliant with all kinds of RSS feed readers, so update your feeds and be one of the cool kids. For the feed-knowledge-deficient clicking on the icon will open up whole worlds of explanations about what a feed is and why you want one.

the old fasioned way. Just ignore Bill Joy’s rants for a second, sit back, and appreciate these two fine examples of robo-evolution.

Yup. One has man-bits and the other has a lady hole. Check out the Sexed Robots site for more photos, technical specs, and a nice quicktime movie of robots doing what robots do to make l’il baby bots. This is NSFW if you’re silicon based. If you’re carbon-based, it’s probably OK. Unless your boss is really uptight.

[via the Boing]

The 2006 Chinese Robot Expo and International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems is over. You missed it.

Which might be a good thing, since the joint was overrun with replicants:

No really, Deckard better come out of retirement, because skin jobs are no longer fictional. Zou Renti of Xi’an Supermen Sculpture Institution (he’s the one on the left. Erm, the one on the right… No, no, the one on the left is Zou) sits next to his skin job (wait, is “skin job” politically incorrect? Is some robo-rights activist going to insist that I use the term “Replicant American?”) The doppelgänger’s skin is silica gel surrounding a robotic skeleton. It can talk, interact, and move. (But will it take ze pleazhurz from ze snake?)

The event, sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Robotics Society of Japan, showcased much of Asia’s finest robots. Other robots weren’t all so realistic. Disney better watch its back as well.

The thing with most physical robots is that they look kinda boring. A PC with wheels and some 80/20 supports. Robots need to look more like, well… you know: Robots!

So occasionally we’ll post drawings/paintings/illustrations of robots. Which will hopefully inspire robot builders to make their bots more anthropomorphic. Or something.

The painting below is by Craig Berry. Who draws robots. And women. And vampires. It’s like, my three favorite things in the whole wide world!

Click the above photo for some more of Craig’s cool robot art.

[WARNING: this post has an image that some people might find squicky. Proceed with caution.]

Occasionally we here at Suicide Bots, like all the other people who work with tools and things, learn things in the shop that just cannot be taught any other way.

For example, say you had 1800lbs of lumber fall on you a while back. Say that today you happened to have been standing on a hard concrete floor all day, noodling with something or other, and you realize that the ankle you broke back then is really super swollen because you are a stubborn git who took his cast off at the first available opportunity (hypothetically, of course, WE don’t know ANYONE who would do THAT around here. . .).

You don’t have an ice pack and you can’t really perambulate around to get one, so what do you do?

Ladies and Gentleman, I bring you Shop Tip #2. The voluptuous curves of a plastic Coke bottle make a a stunning and ergonomically sexy ice pack to put some cold on the ankle right where it’s needed:

Right, I suppose I should mention Shop Tip #1. Shop Tip #1 was established before this site went live. Shop Tip#1 is the hard and fast rule that whenever you are stacking something (like oh say 1800lbs of melamine-coated pulp board) for PITY’S SAKE stack in such a way that it cannot fall on top of you when you are not looking.

It’ll take a couple extra minutes, but trust me it will save roughly six weeks, two titanium pins, several rounds of ineffective painkillers, and the embarrassment of having your significant other chasing the autonomous medication dispensary around the hospital with a camera phone:

Okay shop nerds, anyone have any other tips they care to share with the class?

Little known fact: I grew up near a dairy farm. I’ve milked a cow or two. It’s not exactly fun, but it isn’t dreadful either.

Robots are now doing the dirty work on a farm in Pennsylvania, where 10 robots milk 500 cows, who voluntarily walk into the robo-milkers to dump their udders (humans don’t hook up the standard milker. This is 100% automated.)

[The system] reduced the farm’s labor costs by 75% and raised milk production by 15%, says Waybright, president of the farm. He plans to buy 30 more robots to milk the rest of the herd. “Robots don’t get sick, need health insurance, have birthdays, get drunk, and they always show up,” Waybright says.

When a cow enters the milking stall, the robot “recognizes” the cow by a transponder in her collar. Data about the cow, including the last time she was milked and her expected yield, is uploaded to the robot’s Linux-based interface from a database running on a Windows PC. The DeLaval VMS uses a hydraulic arm, two lasers, and an imaging-processing system to detect the cow’s teats, which are sanitized before milking. When done, the equipment automatically detaches. Cows are enticed with a protein snack. “Cows pick up their own rhythm. They’re habit-forming animals and typically adjust to the new process easily,” says Tony Brazda, a DeLaval VMS solutions manager.

Click photo for full story.

This is clearly a big win for anyone who’s ever had to get up at four-effing-thirty in the morning to milk cows. So listen up, you silicon lotharios: You robots can grab as many bovine mammaries as you want. But the homo-sapien mamaries are strictly for us homo-sapiens. You touch even one of the boobies I’ve targeted for squeezeling, and your batteries go bye-bye. Got it?