Ummm… I think it’s work safe… Unless robot nookie is bad.

This video isn’t erotic. It’s just … odd.

Gizmodo has posed a short video of Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage of Mythbusters painting the Mona Lisa in less than a second:

They start the demo by bringing out their trusty paintball-enabled r/c swivel arm robot, which demonstrates the concept by firing a happy face on the wall. Ooh! Variable speed!

I agree with Gizmodo’s assessment, seeing as the demo was only tangentially apropos to the premise, which was the difference between CPUs and GPUs:

The sheer ridiculousness of this demonstration makes its questionable veracity completely, totally, seriously excusable.

Because everybody knws that if your demo is awesome enough, you can get away with a small amount of bad science.

Trebor the Mad Overlord has sent us a little scientific research he conducted called “Menticulation of Diet Coke In Microgravity“. Robert Woodhead and his son spent weeks making arrangements to expose Diet Coke and Mentos to each other in Microgravity. I’ll spare you the abstract and just get to the video part:

Here is the crux of their inquiry:

As described in a previous post, the hypothesis that we wanted to test was that convection of the soda was an important part of the whole reaction; under normal gravity, bubbles formed around the mentos rise up through the soda, allowing more soda to come in contact with the candy, and thus more bubbles form. However, in microgravity, there’s no “up”, so any bubbles that form will just stay near the mento, and will in fact keep new cola from reaching it.

Robert follows this with a detailed and well written analysis of what when right, what went wrong, and how the next Menticulator is going to totally blow this one out of the water.

How is this relevant to robots!? I hear you cry. Well, Robert and his kids are regular competitors, participants and supporters of RoboGames. Plus, you know you wanted to see this whether it had a robot actually in it or not.

[Thanks Robert Woodhead!]

Katyusha Kalashnikova the Foul-Mouthed Midget sends us this neat little software bot that locates closed-captioned movies in whatever zip code you happen to be in.

Fomdi is a happy little search bot that enables the deaf and hard of hearing to find a movie they can actually enjoy in a theater. You’d be surprised how annoying this is to do ordinarily.

In addition, today YouTube unveiled a new captioning service for its videos, which is very forward thinking and not-evil of them to do. YouTube joins the ranks of other like-minded companies like the BBC, CNet, UC Berkeley, MIT and Gonzodoga that have realized that you you can just do the darndest things with all this new technology, and make friends and influence people besides.

Cedric Dupont, engineer for Volkwagen and collaborator on Stanford’s DARPA Grand Challenge team, has written an enchanting article on building Stanley for the 2005 DARPA grand Challenge.

Why Stanley? Stanford was originally planning to use a Ford SUV for this project, and Mike thought it would be clever to call the robot “Stan” (Stanford, get it? I thought you would). Obviously this joke did not work with the VW Touareg, and the team chose “roadrunner” as the new codename. In fact most of Mike’s original code still refers to “roadrunner”. A few months later, when the time came to have our first press event we revisited the issue of naming. Both Pamela Mahoney (our liaison with major sponsor MDV) and myself felt that “Roadrunner” did not sound likeable enough, and there was also a brief consideration of trademark issues (Plymouth produced a Road Runner). Reminiscing the early Stan I proposed Stanley, which was deemed to sound more friendly, “human” and somehow recalled the pioneering/exploratory dimension of this project. And so the car was christened. Anecdotically, in the summer of 2005 Joe and I built a duplicate as back up, that we dubbed “Stanlette”. It was a near perfect copy, with a few minor differences in the skidplate and bumper guard, an improved electric system and a more modern engine (the 6-cyl TDI). For the record, we never had to use our backup and it is the original Stanley, the same one that survived thousands of miles of testing that conquered the Darpa Grand Challenge.

Stanley was installed at the Smithsonian in 2006.

[Thanks Lem!]

Here’s another bit of press that just came in from the 2008 RoboGames, courtesy La Prensa in Honduras (lo siento, solo es en Espanol):

La ciudad norteamericana de San Francisco acogió, en junio, el mayor campeonato robótico abierto del mundo registrado por el libro de Guinness de récords mundiales. Un total de 19 países en 58 acontecimientos con 176 equipos, 482 entradas, 504 robustezas, y 563 ingenieros celebraron a lo grande, lo anteriormente conocido como ROBOlympics, el ahora renombrado RoboGames. Esta competencia, donde admiten cualquier tipo de robot que pueda hacer algo inteligente, invita a las mejores mentes del mundo para competir dentro de 70 diversos acontecimientos, dentro de las cuales ocho son para humanoides, entre las que están fútbol, sumo, hockey o baloncesto u otras más específicas como extinción de incendios, exploración o arte. La categoría estrella, es el combate a “muerte” que tiene lugar en un recinto a prueba de balas y que enfrenta a 340 robots de diferente origen y con distintos armamentos cuyo único objetivo es destrozar a su rival. Una vez que empieza la lucha, la deportividad brilla por su ausencia y las máquinas ponen en marcha sus mecanismos de ataque y defensa, que pasan de escupir fuego, levantar y lanzar al contendiente hasta despedazar su estructura metálica como si fuera mantequilla con unas afiladas espadas giratorias. Las robustezas que no caben en una categoría específica pueden incorporarse al “mejor de la demostración” que puede ser cualquier clase de “máquina” que hace cualquier cosa. Los acontecimientos de la liga menor se fijan específicamente para los constructores de robots menores de 18 años. Robo Games fue fundado por David Calkins como el ROBOlympics en 2004 donde 11 países hicieron sus presentaciones en 31 acontecimientos con 173 equipos, 414 entradas, 430 robustezas, y 547 ingenieros. Calkins trabajaba con distintos tipos de competencias robóticas y se dio cuenta de la necesidad de un evento magno para constructores especializados. Reunió así distintos creadores de combate en robótica como ingenieros mecánicos, junto con los de fútbol, avalados por programadores de computadora. También incluyó robótica de sumo con sensores, androides de control remoto y las robustezas del arte o estéticos. El objetivo, intercambiar las ideas y mayor aprendizaje.“Éste es un evento abierto,cualquiera puede participar, lo que permite que diferentes constructores se conozcan, algo que no ocurriría si no fuese por los juegos”, dice David, quien califica la competencia como un “encuentro de mentes”. La segunda meta del fundador es dar reconocimiento a la creación de ingeniería mundial a través de varias disciplinas premiadas en oro, plata y bronce. Ahora Robo Games,luego de 4 años, cuenta con un registro en el libro de récord mundiales como el evento más grande del mundo en robótica.

[Thanks Mauricio Antonio Martinez Gonzales!]

Raise a glass and wipe a tear from your eye. Alvin, that intrepid Navy explorer famed for exploring the Titanic with Dr. Robert Ballard’s team at Woods Hole, is heading for the great metal front porch. He will be replaced by leaner, meaner, raw cast titanium whipper snapper that is costing some 50 million dollars.

From the NYT:

The new vehicle is to replace Alvin, which was the first submersible to illuminate the rusting hulk of the Titanic and the first to carry scientists down to discover the bizarre ecosystems of tube worms and other strange creatures that thrive in icy darkness.

The United States used to have several submersibles — tiny submarines that dive extraordinarily deep. Alvin is the only one left, and after more than four decades of probing the sea’s depths it is to be retired. Its replacement, costing some $50 million, is to go deeper, move faster, stay down longer, cut the dark better, carry more scientific gear and maybe — just maybe — open a new era of exploration.

I personally will definitely be pouring one out for my junked homie; discovering the Titanic and all the attendant wonder of deep sea exploration made realize how bitchin’ science actually is. Alvin is where the scientists who deployed Argo the ROV and Jason the autonomous submersible were stationed.

Badass leader of robots, we salute you.

Enjoy your retirement.

[via Gizmodo and the Grey Lady]

So if wiggling ICE-powered donkey’s weren’t bad enough, Boston Dymanics now gives us robotic spidermen. Well, spiderbugs… (is that redundant?)

RiSE is a small six-legged robot that climbs vertical terrain such as walls, trees and fences. RiSE’s feet have claws, micro-claws or sticky material, depending on the climbing surface. RiSE changes posture to conform to the curvature of the climbing surface and a fixed tail helps RiSE balance on steep ascents. RiSE is about 0.25 m long, weighs 2 kg, and travels 0.3 m/s.

Each of RiSE’s six legs is powered by two electric motors. An onboard computer controls leg motion, manages communications, and services a variety of sensors. The sensors include an inertial measurement unit, joint position sensors for each leg, leg strain sensors and foot contact sensors.

Future versions of RiSE will use dry adhesion to climb sheer vertical surfaces such as glass and metal. Boston Dynamics is developing RiSE in conjunction with researchers at University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, Stanford, and Lewis and Clark University. RiSE is funded by the DARPA Defense Sciences Office.

Crabfu likes it! Everyone wins!

The fine folks at Trossen Robotics recently sent I-Wei Huang of Crab Fu (swash bots, steam beasts, other things mere plebes like we can only dream of creating) , a Bioloid kit from Robotis. I-wei messed around with it and deemed it, for the non-engineer robot person, “fit”.

Here’s a bit from is post on the Trossen Robotics Community:

These servos have a few really nice design features. 1) there are no cords coming out of it like normal servos. You can hook them up from one to another, daisy chain them together, keeping a really clean wired robot. Each servo is labeled with it’s ID and has an LED which can light up for you to check if you are controlling the correct servo from the software. 2) Servos can be continuous. With my PutterBot, I had to physically hack into the servo to make it continuous, so that it can be used as a drive gear for the tank tracks. Robotis servos can be used as regular servos, or can rotate forever, like a wheel. 3) servos are digital, very strong and can relay info back to the system, allowing you to capture rotational values to the pc by simply rotating the servos by hand. Simply put, instead of sliding sliders around in the software, or worse yet type in values, to get servos where you want them, you just pose the robot and the software knows what rotational value each servo has.

[Thanks Trossen!]

Wii + Roomba + being bored / eating Cheetos with chopsticks = neato:

Ron Tajima thought this up and did it, thanks to a little help from WiiUse and Hacking Roomba

[via Gizmodo and the Balance Board Blog]

All those beautiful, beautiful visions spinning about in your head have been made into gorgeous alcoholic reality. Ladies and gentlemen, Bar2D2:

Bar2D2 is capable of making your basic cocktails, and also incorporates a beer elevator to put a frosty brew into your hands upon request. The beer elevator is the business bits of a Harbor Freight electric caulking gun.

The base is a electric power chair, and he can schmooze with the cocktail crowd with his extensive R2D2 vocabulary, courtesy an R2D2 voice module and a Team Delta RCE210 relay board.

The beer elevator is enclosed by a spiffy polycarbonate cocoon, and the ice bucket lights up.

How prosh can a cocktail-slinging robot get??

Jamie Price, the builder, has a great set of photos of his progress here.

Bar2D2 has been a scant five months in the making, by a guy who has a day job and everything. Jamie credits stick-to-itiveness and BAD (Beer Aided Design) for his success.

Here’s his parts list:

My goal:
Create an rc bot that is loosely (very) modeled after R2D2 for the sole purpose of being a mobile bar/entertainment center.

Features:
Clear lexan dome that houses a 6 liquor bottle carousel
Cups that have LED color shift (damn I love ebay)
Motorized Ice bin (remotely actuated)
Beer dispensing elevator (remotely actuated)
Neon, LED lighting accents
Motorized drivetrain
R2D2 sound effects
12 volt sla powered with on board ac/dc wall converter for long party times
2 victor 883 escs
futaba 6 channel radio
materials: metal, 3/4″ finish grade ply, sintra, lexan, chrome, plastic

If all goes well (and it has been!) Bar2D2 will be accepting his public and signing autographs at DragonCon in Atlanta, Georgia, August 29-September 1st (that’s next weekend campers!).

We’re also hoping Bar2D2 makes it to Vienna for RoboExotica this year.

[via The Robot Fighting League Forum]

Excellent public art is a hard things to find sometimes, however really excellent public art with a sense of humor is worth its weight in alien-destroying rhinovirus goo:

The War Of The World invading alien tripod is a permanent public art erected in 1998 in Woking UK, the home town of HG Wells, by a sculptor named Michael Congdon.

It’s perdy.

[via Oddity Central]

This is what we have to look forward to. Kinda:

[via Gizmodo and New Scientist]

The Orb Swarm is slowly taking its place in history:

The Institute for Personal Robots in Education has included an image of the Orb Swarm in the beginning of Chapter 12 of their fine textbook, Introduction To Computer Science Via Robots.
The chapter’s title, “Fast, Cheap And Out Of Control”*, is deeply satisfying for it recall of the illustrious Rodney Brooks, but inaccurate in that the orbs are none of these three things.

When the Orbs are trashing their hotel rooms and refusing to perform unless all the 10k resistors are removed from the green room snack try, we can all say we knew them when.

Incidentally, the IPRE is a great resource for high level robotics education and other robotics stuff.

*Fast Cheap and Out Of Control is also, of course, the title of a splendid documentary by Errol Morris featuring Professor Brooks, Dave Hoover the wild animal trainer, George Menodça the topiary gardener, and Ray Mendez the naked mole rat specialist. You should watch it as soon as possible if you have not, and watch it again if you have.