The Tiller Girls are the work of Louis-Phillippe Demers, A robotic artist that creates works and wins prestige under the name The Processing Plant.

We love this sort of thing and eat it up just like the demo bot below rends concrete flesh from rebar bones:

That was just Number 6, see the rest over at Make:Blog

Thanks Heather Knight!

Chiggity check out the livestream here!

Courtesy those masters of modern problem solving techniques, Willow Garage (proud and beloved Sponsors of RoboGames, full disclosure, natch)

[Via Neatorama!]

The talk is “Build A Robot, Be A Rock Star: RoboGames” and it will be about various and sundry interesting tidbits about our seven years producing RoboGames.

So, grab a giant can of Tecate, camp out in the parking lot, and troop in to hear me talk a bunch about robots, games, and other things.

MakerFaire is this Saturday and Sunday May 22-23rd at the San MAeo Convention Center in lovely San Mateo, California. See everything cool you could possibly think up in the wildest realms of your imagination, all in one place, and learn how you can make each and every single thing yourself.

Whee! So much will be going on, you won’t even be able to absorb it all in one weekend. Yay!

While we ere at SuicideBots are not a religious bent, we can always get behind a homestyle feast and copious quantities of red wine.

[Thank you to our hero, @ebertchicago]

ABE in happier times

Brought out of retirement for an expedition off the coast of Chile, ABE, and autonomous exploratory submersible, was searching for hydrothermal vents on the sea floor when both acoustic transponders on his hull stopped responding.

Dr. Dana Yoerger, senior scientist and a member of the team who built ABE, speaking from the expedition ship Melville, said in ABE’s New York Times Obituary: “For both to die at exactly the same time means probably something very bad and very violent happened,”

Dr. Chris German, a Woods Hole senior scientist who was also in Chile with ABE at the time of the accident, soldiered on admirably, though shaken.

“You’re stuck at sea and you can’t just cry and go home,” he said. “So you figure out what’s the best you can do with what’s available.” That has involved using more conventional equipment to sample the water for other evidence of hydrothermal events, compiling data that can be used when researchers come back.”

Dr. Dana Yoerger reflects:

Dr. Yoerger said he had tried not to become too emotional about the loss of ABE, particularly given the human suffering nearby in Chile from the recent earthquake. “This is aluminum, glass and silicon,” he said. “We can build a new one.”

Still, he said, there had been some trying moments. “The most difficult one was writing the e-mails to my children and grandchildren telling them that their robotic friend was gone.”

::sniffle:: Goodspeed, ABE, tell Cthulhu “Hi” for us as your survey the streets of downtown R’Lyeh for all eternity.

[Tip of the cocktail napkin to OtherMichael]

This video featuring the Bagger 288 large-scale industrial mining bucket-wheel excavator, is one such work.

[via @iidocracy on Twitter]