So I know you are just aching with anticipation for Wall-E to come out on th 27th of June, but why not go completely gooey over this incredibly, insanely, weepingly cute real, live Wall-E in the meantime?

More info on Disney/Pixar’s Wall-E

Radioactive Jam, our Barbie-sparkle-pony-princess-poptart-eating man in the field, send us this little gem about monkeys that can control robots with their minds.

Let’s consider this again:

MONKEYS!

That control ROBOTS!

WITH THEIR BRAINS!

Not only THAT, but they can already do it from far away!

This is making me all nostalgic for the good old Monkey Vs. Robot days, when everybody ended up smooshed or shredded to little metals bits, and the humans just looked elsewhere and ignored the inevitable.

[Massive props to Radioactive Jam, who still is a poptart wuss, and James Kochalka for the Proustian Moment]

Mars Phoenix has joined Spirit and Opportunity on the surface of Mars. It’s just landed, S and O are probably just waiting for Phoenix to clear customs and get its baggage.

Lots of news about this in various places, and also Mars Phoenix has a Twitter account.

On the road, a blogging failure, but this just in from Sylvain Canon at Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory (LASA), Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. They are the guys who came up with the nifty Salamander robot at NextFest last year.

Whoo Hoo, robot season!

I wrote this for Servo magazine – the magazine about robots that you should be subscribing to.

In 1921, Karl Čapek wrote the play Rossum’s Universal Robots, thus coining the term “Robot” (ok, technically it was his brother Josef who amended Karl’s original term from either the Latin laboři, or the Czech trudnik, but we won’t quibble. It was still Karl’s play.) In the play, they were not electro-mechanical humans. They were very much flesh and blood, manufactured in fleshy parts and later assembled. This very much follows the golum and Frankenstein mythos. And it is clearly the basis for follow-ups like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / Blade Runner, BattleStar Galactica, and to an extent, zombie mythos. Ah, but language is ever so fluid, and the original intended Corpus Novum in the above tales has since been replaced by “clone” in modern usage. Yet we grandfather the word “robot” in on the above stories. But under Čapek’s original definition, none of us can call our creation a “robot.”

And now, we have so very many different opinions on what a robot is. Ask ten roboticists for a definition, and you’ll get fifteen answers.

More

I did! (I know, I know I’m *sorry*)

This month’s Servo has an article I wrote about Roboexotica 2007, which was a hill of fun and should be put on early and often. Vienna throws the best cocktail robot festivals in the world (San Francisco being a close second)

Mr. Robotics has a rant about robots or something or other. Which is, as you know, completely unusual and unexpected. Read and enjoy.

Giant mechanical spiders take away some of the hurt in the world:

Just *listening* to it is awesome. See the giant stompy monster action from a different angle here.

[Thanks Alexander Rose! Merci Beaucoup pur les fotos, Tristian Sabatier!

Ya Rly:

Daniel Terdiman, tech-journo-about-town, popped in at our RoboexoticUS setup cocktail party thingy and this is what he had to say.

Also, Scott Beale took a really long photo of El Espanol Borracho doing his thing:

Join us at 354 5th Street tonight to see for yourself. We begin drinking at 8pm sharp. $5-10 sliding scale, robots will give you the love you crave, in alcohol form. Cash bar aslo available for them what want to get down to the nitty gritty.

Roboexotica, the international cocktail robot festival lands on US Soil. Finally.

Mechatiki has info for us:

We will see you all then, Saturday, May 10th, 2008, from 8pm-2am at 345 Fifth Street, San Francisco, to consume civilized robot beverages, discuss lofty technology, and drink ourselves under the tiki bar.

Here’s more info from monochrom.

Sorry for blog silence of late, there’s only one of me and sadly I can only be in about three places at once. . .We just wrapped up Makerfaire, which was a red-hot funnelcake-flavored DIY bowl of awesome. We didn’t see too too much of it, as we were chained to the robot fighting arena, but the Orb Swarm made an appearance, the dark room was filled with nifty works by Gaspo and others, Because We Can showed off their art mini golf course, The Flaming Lotii, Cyclecide, The Neverwas Haul and millions of other delights and delirium made the whole place seem like one big long trip to Wackyland

Here’s a video turned out by our excellent student video prodigy guy from San Francisco State, Brian Chu.

Please note that the beer appearing in the pits was Stunt Beer, and not to be taken as any indication that any team was imbibing alcoholic beverages around heavy, dangerous equipment. That would be bad.

Even if it was really, really good beer (thank you, Lagunitas!)