The world’s very first antisocial network. Explore it in all its glory, and smite your enemies with the robotic spatula-ey goodness.

“My, *where* did you get that *lovely* spatula?”

[Thanks qDot, who is racing me to post this first.]

Okay so maybe it’s slightly cooler than a little bit of wocka-chicka music, but robot satellites maintaining a hard-core autonomous connection still gets our juices flowing:

ST. LOUIS, April 19, 2007 - Satnews Daily - The two robot satellites in the Orbital Express mission have achieved their second historic first with the successful transfer of hardware—in this case a battery—between orbiting spacecraft.

Remember kids, second historic firsts are almost as neat as third future ex-spouses, or something. . .

ASTRO and NEXTSAT exchange batteries, and possibly so, so much more. . .

“Hey baby, you come to this orbital plane often?”

“Does that work on all the robots in the exosphere or just the semiautonomous ones?”

“C’mon baby, how’s about you and me link up? I got some solar sails that only flare for you. . .”

And so on and so forth. . .

BTW, this is way cooler than it needs to be. Your tax dollars at work my friends. . .

[Thanks RICK!]

Thanks to the folks in the SWARM group (who do phenomenally interesting work and who will be last to have their data scrambled when the Revolution comes) we bring you a very tasty package that JPL, in their infinite wisdom, has released for he rest of us who may or may not know what to do with it.

CLARAty is Coupled-Layer Architecture for Robot Autonomy (If that doesn’t sound like Skynet’s great-gramma, nothing does).

CLARAty was designed to be “portable, modular, flexible and extendable” in accordance with its use across lots of different designs and scenarios.

It’s open-source, just like SWARM, which makes us all flutter our LEDs with delight. So go play around with it, and figure out where it breaks and let’s all make it better so we can properly bow down to out robot overlo- I mean, collaborate on effective techniques for surface mobility and control algorithms.

Our first instinct is to program it to be mischievous.

Our second instinct would be to teach it to play ball
.

It’s a robotic desklamp. It follows you when you move. It worships the things you work on by bathing it in lustrous illumination. It’s also cute. Golly those MIT people are clever.

[Thanks Alexander Rose!]

So while Mr. Robotics The Head Rotor and SB undo the wreckage and find out where things are in the post-RoboGames wasteland, here’s the superheavyweight gold medal match between The Judge and Ziggy for your edification:

Thanks to Zannel, a RoboGames Sponsor, for having this available before we could find it anywhere else!

Robot Haiku is pretty awesome. You’d think something like that would be pretty unique on teh interwebs. But no.

Someone tell Fembot
that she has an evil twin:
Bad Robot Haiku

. . to tell you all that RoboGames has its own Twitter Stream.

Twitter is the latest in awesome, completely superfluous over-the-ether communication. We personally love it.

Keep up with those off-the-cuff happenings and be apprised of imminent instances of free beer with this nifty little app. You can get tweets through your cell phone, IM client or direct via the web. Robogames will be wired for internets in the venue, so the comment should get more and more interesting/nonsensical as the event wears on. . .

Tweet you there!

Tip of the hubcap to qDot from whom I stole the idea.
Dude, I looked and looked but couldn’t find it on your site…so I made one meself.
.

San Francisco’s Dolores Park is usually pretty safe. Unless, of course, you get caught in a Robot Rumble! (Fortunately for us puny humans, they seem more interested in bashing each other.)

More rockin robot rumble results here.

Rumors hint that even more cybernetic cardboard carnage may be unavoidable at RoboGames. You Have Been Warned.

Holy Heck!

Posting will be lightish this week as we are getting ready for OMG RoboGames next week!

Get yer tix here!

Lots of pics, stories and liveblogging to come!

Faithful reader and robotteer Gary Gin sends along this treasure:

Let the avalanche begin, creative types. . .

[THANK YOU Xeni Jardin, for posting about this, thank you Diesel Sweeties Guy, for making it go. DAMMIT.]