So! We decided to pool all our nickels and throw together a little robot shindig next weekend. We’re bringing in all our good friends and dedicated crew folks, and we will make a concerted effort to

[metal voice]
MAKE SURE THE FINEST ROBOT COMBAT ENGINEERING MARVELS IN THE COUNTRY SHRED EACH OTHER INSIDE THE ARENA FOR TWO. SOLID. DAYS.
[/metalvoice]

You knew it was coming, we’re gluttons for punishment, it’s

The Sixth Annual ComBots Cup
October 29-30th 2011
At the lovely San Mateo County Expo Center
in Beautiful San Mateo, California
2pm-7pm
Adults: $25 at the door or $20 in advance.
Children 7-17: $20 at the door or $15 in advance.
Children 0-6: free. (Warning: it’s very loud.)
BUY TICKETS HERE!

Dozens of robots makers from all over the globe have cast common sense to the wind and scattered the contents of their bank accounts in sacrifice to The Robot Gods in order to bring you one amazing weekend of total mechanical ridiculousness in the form of ear-searing, heart-stopping, insurance-adjuster-apoplexy-causing Robot Combat!

See the champions from Brazil, Team RioBotz, make their maiden Combots Cup voyage against the likes of Last Rights, Sewer Snake, Original Sin, Vlad the Impaler II and The Ragin’ Scotsman!

Here’s a complete list of all the heavyweight contenders, their stats, their photos, and bios! Get your learn on, kids, there’s going to be a quiz later!

Smell the all-too familiar and strikingly addictive Robot Combat Smell – a touch of burnt metal, the fizz of exploded battery packs, and the wrenching feotor of broken dreams!

Get your tickets in advance, the stands are always crowded!

Super special guest: Jason Dante Bardis, putting his scary R/C moves on Vlad The Impaler II! You saw him on TV, you marveled at his skill with Dr. Inferno Junior, now see him go All. The. Way with 220lbs of shrieking steel, built by a madman and hewn from the very depths of Robot Hell itself!

Seriously. Robot Hell. We’ve seen it.

So! Come on down, grab a beer, and settle in to watch five hours of hot robot on robot action EACH DAY, Saturday and Sunday October 29-30th. It will be Epic.

The Robotics Society of America, proud 501(c)3 nonprofit and co-promoter for RoboGames, has been picked to be in the running for $25k as part of the Pepsi Refresh project!

We Need Your Help! Vote for us to get $25,000 bucks so that we can get underserved kids building robots, and have them compete at RoboGames!

We have until the end of the month to end up in the Top 15 slots!

If we get funded, we’ll have the ability to get a whole slew of robot kits for a whole slew of kids that would otherwise not have them, or the teaching time to learn science math and engineering through robots!

You can sign in to the site with FaceBook, or create an account there; you can text, tweet, reblog it, sing it from the mountain tops, whatever helps us get the word out!

You can vote for us EVERY SINGLE DAY until the end of the month! Vote early, vote often, tell your friends, bribe your enemies!

RoboGames, unlike some other youth robotics programs we might mention, never charges for our Under 18 youth league! We don’t restrict by ability, equipment, or anything else, and we provide valuable experience and international exposure to all our competitors!

We have been doing this for nine years on a largely all-volunteer basis, but just imagine what we, who have done so much for so many with so little, could do if we had some actual cash to grease the skids!

We’ll keep you updated as the month goes on, currently we’re in 48th place!

Thanks very much, we’re all crossing our fingers! Get out there and vote for us! (please. Please.)

So the Robot Film Fest was a couple of weeks ago in NYC, and because we are a sub par blogger we failed to cover it in any form while we were there (except for a few questionable photos which showed up on Twitter and probably a few embarrassing YouTube videos which have yet to surface).

Pictured: A performance by Tim Laursen and Double Rainbow, the robot rock band. Photo by SB.

Anyhow, the event was a glorious success, and Heather Knight (beloved RoboGames Academic Chair) and the fabulous team from Magic Futurebox who co-produced the event were rock stars and made everyone else feel like one too.

Here’s a few tidbits from the event (for which I was a jury member):

Paparazzi snapped in his face, but 1337 was not fazed. Wearing a scarlet bow tie slightly askew, the 2-foot-tall humanoid robot continued walking down the red carpet – guided firmly by his stooping programmer Carlos Asmat. With the air of a Hollywood film premiere, the first ever Robot Film Festival was underway this past weekend at the 3-Legged Dog Art and Technology Center in lower Manhattan.

-a lovely piece from New Scientist

Cute Photos From Science House

Lots more Robot Film Fest press here.

In addition to failing at blogging the event, I actually achieved the unlikely – I was in the same room as many of my robotic twitter cohort, such as Dustyn Robots, The Chief Robot, and Erico Guizzo – and I failed to meet all of them except for Erico, with whom I had a three second convo before he lolloped off to see his young family.

I blame the exquisite robot-themed cocktails – the BeatBot was an especial favorite.

There are already schemes and plans being put into play for next year, we can’t wait!

The full complement of movies shown at the film fest can be found here, thanks to Marek Michalowski of BeatBots

From the always superlative Robots-Dreams comes a great English-language summary of this month’s RoboCon Magazine, for we pathetic non-Japanese speaking English speakers.

Among the juicy delights afforded us by the always well-done RoboCon robotics journal is a fab, huge article covering RoboGames 2011, at which we were very honored to have an enthusiastic contingent of competitors from Robot Japan.

Robot Japan is a collection of robotics enthusiasts that holds meetings, maintain a blog, and serves as a relatively informal organizing body for robotics events around Japan.

We were excited that several members were planning on attending RoboGames 2011, and that was even before a little thing like one of the biggest earthquakes in recorded history, and a horrendous, devastating tsunami occurred right in their back yard.

To recap: DEVASTATING EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI, and they made it to the competition anyway.

We’ve had competitors from other countries (including the USA) whinge about having to get up before ten and how the hotel sheets weren’t the right thread count, so needless to say, we were impressed.

After everything they had been through and after overcoming some technical glitches, we were extremely pleased to see this:

It’s obvious that the Japan contingent had a wonderful time, made lots of new friends, and is committed to participating in strength next Spring at RoboGames 2012.

Along with articles on Taylor Veltrop‘s awesome Kinect/ROS/Wii Frankensteinian humanoid action, there’s loads more about Robot Japan 1st and all the other great things which makes RoboCon reason enough in itself for us over her to run out and learn Japanese posthaste.

[Thanks a millions, Lem!]

Update: HOLY NUGGETS! WE DID IT! AND WITH FIVE DAYS TO GO!

You all win at cocktail robots, thanks a ton to our backers, each and every one!

–
Lend us you ears! And your antennas! And your sonar sensors, and photovoltaics, and . . .whatever. So, we have thins fun and exciting event coming up, which is completely awesome any way you slice it, but even awesome if you are in the greater San Francisco bay Area and can actually go:

BARBOT 2011!


A lost weekend of cocktail robotics
April 1-2, 2011
9pm-2am
Parisoma Innovation Loft
169 11th Street, San Francisco
21+ with photo ID $10 advance / $15 at door
Buy Tickets here!

And that’s all neat and everything, but before we get there, we have to get the actual robots there and working! So, please have a gander at this here Kickstarter thingy we have set up to get the last little shreds of money to have the most amazing BarBot OMG EVAR:

GIVE US YOUR POCKET CHANGE HERE AND MAKE THE ROBOTS HAPPY

Kickstarter is the darndest thing, We have been up for a day and are over halfway to our goal of $743!

That’s right, we just need $292 dollars to be TOTALLY FREAKING FUNDED!

Nice people who send us a buck get heartfelt thanks and updates, people who get more get even *more* heartfelt thanks and updates, plus cool robot stickers, buttons and lots of other neat things that make *you* part of this project! Tell your friends! Tell your enemies! Tell your cocktail robot loving dog! Help us get the word out, and you can say you knew us back when! Yay!

BarBot 2011 would also at this time like to thank Red Bull USA, who are being awesome and generously supporting Barbot 2011.

Red Bull gives *my* robot wings, how about yours?

This event would not, literally, be happening without them stepping up and raising a glass to cocktail robots everywhere. Like them on the Facebooks, @ them on the Twitters, and tell ‘em we sent ya!

Are you an artist? Do you schlep and hurp and derp and sit at tables and sell things after working long lonely hours on your robot art?

Well then, we have something in which you might be interested.

Image courtesy 2011 Artist Table holder Josh Ellingson and our lovely sponsor Willow Garage

RoboGames for the very first time ever, in the tradition of APE, WonderCon and Comicon, is having an Artist’s section where makers of fine robot-themed art can peddle their wares in safety and comfort.

Interested? Oh yes you are. Contact Simone at RoboGames dot net for details and extremely reasonable pricing.

The superlative Jeri Ellsworth brings us this touching take of how a contest featuring everyone’s favorite integrated circuit chip 555 Contest (currently running and sponsored, in part, by RoboGames, whee!) came to be.

I am sure all of our faithful readers (all six of you) out there will jump at the chance to win bragging rights and fabulous prizes by entering the contest! Go go go!

Now, get the hell off his lawn.

Mark Pauline, punk rock übermensch of Survival Research Labs gave a talk at the Sonoma County Museum of Art the other day, in which he related his experiences starting up SRL,trials and tribulations along he way, and how the damn kids can’t even fix a toilet nowadays.

This is the first of three parts for this talk, for the other two hop on over to SRL.org

SRL has made a move from the greasy innards of the city to the kinder more pastoral environs of the far north suburbs, to reflect the mellowing with age that affects us all. This just means that when you are hanging on the rear end of the exposed high-speed workings of the Big Arm in order to counterbalance the Running Machine, which is stuck on the truck and threatening to pull everything down with it, instead of skinning the hell out of your knees on oily concrete when the whole thing goes over, you end up up to you shoulders in positively pillowlike hay bales and sticks, not that anyone here has any experience with that, also, ow.

So the other day, I got myself a Skype account and hunkered down in the living bunker of Uncanny Valley Estates (where we live and work and poke the robots with sticks) and spent an hour shooting the shit with a few interesting and intelligent people about The Future for the TWiT Fourcast podcast. It was fun.

This video is the result:

So, a small Star Wars Fan in the Chicagoish area picked out a splendid new water bottle for the school year. She was subsequently compelled to feel like she should find a new bottle, because of some churlish lads in the playground, saying girls could not be Star Wars fans.

Gads I hated elementary school because of things like this. But Katie shouldn’t have to!

They said. Girls. Could Not. Be Star Wars Fans.

Gobsmacked I am. The bit of me that is still the nerdy plaid-jumper-wearing tomboy in first grade who loved Star Wars and War Games and reading and science and was excited about everything feels afresh that raw, confusing, impotent frustration and anger that comes from being teased and told you are wrong for doing something you love that is not bothering anybody.

So, to combat this and stick up for what we believe in (epic tale of adventure, science, strong women, that Han shot first) the fine gals over at Epbot and other places have created comment streams for Our Girl Katie to see. So, leave a note here or there saying she’s got backup, and that there are other girls out there who have fought the same fight, and we are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

Image Courtesy OriginalProp.com

The Inestimable Bonnie Burton has also written a great post about this issue over at Star Wars.com

#MayTheForceBeWithKatie Indeed!

[Yes this is a Shop Tip, I have been pushed out of the way in the machine shop and elsewhere too damn many times because I am female for this not to be an issue.]

We’re applying for grants to make RoboGames 2011 morerer awesomelier. Please pause for future postings, starting Tuesday. We had an event in here somewhere too and by god it’s a hard thing to keep up with just two automated gripper arms and a couple of Kiva machines.

My real question – You want to write for Suicidebots? Well hell, we can help you! For the truly robot obssessed who don’t mind thankless, brutal, faceless taskmasters, the job includes little to no pay and a delightful amount of humorous abuse. We don’t work you any harder than we work ourselves, which is to say, the whole experience will probably be painful and, like basic training and building a robot from scratch, is probably an excellent thing to *have* done.

With all caveats in place, send inquiries to knickers@suicidebots.com to find out more and harass us until we say yes.

Hey there campers, we’re (as in, the royal we, as in, me) getting set to decamp to NYC, where MakerFaire NYC is calling all her tired DIYers, poor robot builders and humbled masses yearning to soak up all the cool projects people from all over the country are bringing to show off.

Among these cool projects is Bar2D2, the cocktail robot juggernaut, about which we have written in these hallowed pages before.

Jamie Price, the mad genius who figured Bar2D2 out, has a neat new Instructable that you should all read. Then, go make one of your own!

Incidentally, I am giving a talk about robots and various and sundry things Saturday and Sunday at Makerfaire NYC, on the Make Demo stage. Come by and say hi!

O robot fans the world over: in an effort to open myself up to as much drunken heckling by my friends as humanly possible, while also spreading the love for robots and, especially, RoboGames, I am giving a 50 (!) minute talk this Saturday, May 22nd, at Makerfaire!

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!

A giant thank you to all our staff volunteers competitors and everybody else who made this all happen!

The results for this year’s RoboGames are up at The Official RoboGames Website, thanks for playing, we’ll see you next year!

In yet another episode of living the life you wish you had, last Friday I extracted myself from the RoBunker and went to witness The Head Rotor and Al Honig, world famous artists, show off Chassis the beer pouring robot.

Ky00t, thy name is Chassis:

More pics after the break.
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