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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I was digging around on Instructables when I found this neato link submitted a while ago for Society Of Robots. It’s a bunch of tutorials, advice, and places to satisfy your DIY robot needs.

They also have some good advice about funding.

Their FAQ strums my heartstrings because We here in the RoBunker suddenly have an intense feeling of not being the only people who get asked these very same questions all. the. time.

So go check them out, give some good advice on the Robot Forums, and be gentle to the noobs, you were one once too even if you have blocked the memory out.

The innumerable CTP, a San Francisco artist who plays around with such event as The Power Tool Drag Races, Dorkbot, RoboGames, RoboExotica, and other things that most people find neat-o, has re-launched his spiffy site, Kineticworld.com

Go read it, then come back here and let me know if he covered anything good so I can steal it.

Meantime, here’s a video of CTP in action at last year’s MakerFaire:

One of the smartest people and brightest lights in the mechanical art arena has had a terrible accident.

Photo by John Mathieu Courtesy Laughing Squid

Todd Blair, of SRL, formerly the Exploratorium, Chico MacMurtry collaborator and many, many, many, many other fine projects, had a prop piece fall on him at RoboDock this year He is in a fine hospital in Amsterdam and is in a coma. We are all pulling for him to wake up and smile again.

There is a donation fund for him here, and a blog on his progress here.

Kick in a few bucks if you can. Todd is an artist and of course our culture is great at not enabling artists to be supported with all the benefits and etc a CEO or lawyer would have. We just have a surfeit of love.

Even if you don’t know him, he is one of those people that makes the world a little bit more amazing, and he and his love Alex can use your good wishes and everything else you have right now.

For all you folks that don’t have enough to do online, follow SB online as we wander around the universe on Tumblr! Just check out suicidebots.tumblr.com

Hello Campers, didja miss us?

Suicidebots was down for the count as Mr. Robotics went to the FRA Championship in the UK (about which more as soon as he finds the damn camera) and Missy SB and The Head Rotor took off for parts dry and dusty. We went to the Burning Man festival in the lovely Black Rock desert in Nevada, to, among other things, watch the man burn early and accidentally ram members of The Orb Swarm against the shins of unsuspecting hippies and drunken frat boys. It truly was an accident, we swear. Even if there was giggling.

More in-depth coverage as Mr. Robotics and Missy SB sort things out at the Robunker. We assume the Rotor will return to the Fortress of Solitude in due time, but we’d have to cause a temporal-spatial paradox in order to find that out before he posts here, so be patient. That’s just how Fortresses of Solitude work.

Hey Kids,

No, this post is not about robots per se, but it is about people who like robots and the people who like people who like robots (I am loathe to use the word “Community”, it give me hives, you know what I mean).

After Friday’s devastating storms and tornadoes in and around Deland, Florida, we were noticing the jarring absence of our good friend and compulsive commenter, Suicidebots Regular #42, Radioactive Jam.


Pix courtesy Floridiana

Luckily, after a bit of poking around, we found out that Mr. and Mrs. Jam are all right, having experienced nothing more serious than a bummer of a commute and a bit of wet weather:

As much as I’d like to see the Suicide Bots Action Force mobilized (if nothing else just to see what happens when…) I cannot tell a lie: no tornadic effects in our immediate vicinity. All the bad stuff happened several miles to the south of us; we’re among the fortunate.

Hard, hard times for many people, though. Friends of friends among the fatalities. And while one local official’s remarks seemed kind of stupid - “this tornado had no conscience” or something similar - the indiscriminate nature of… well, nature… is sobering.

This is a PSA to say that if you have some spare paypal cash lying around, give to the Red Cross or Burners Without Borders or some other disaster relief situation or group that makes you happy. You or your family might need them someday in case you ever become a statistic.

Yeah, it’s a small disaster compared to things like hurricane Katrina and genocide in Sudan and everything, but you never know what might happen next and who it may affect.

Okay, maybe some of you aren’t so into the squishy meat puppet sentimentality thing, so I will come at you from another angle:

Radioactive Jam is one of my biggest sticker customers.

So if nothing else, give to disaster relief so he’ll keep Suicidebots.com in business.

Gracious!

Thanks to the bot freax at the Suicide Bots Bunker for the flattering introduction. After an intro like that, I had best not suck! Also, I suspect that hidden behind my monitor is a teleoperated boxing glove on a pneumatic scissor extension to chastise me should I ever get too far off topic. I mean these people at SB have some SERIOUS technology at-FWAP!

Ow! OK! OK!

Back to the bots. Anyway, to present an illusion of non-suckiness, I will start off with this sucky content-free post to say “Howdy,” secure in the knowledge that my posts can only improve* from here.

So, Howdy from the Head Rotor!

[*He's wrong. Things could continue to stay sucky. -SB]

We here at the Robo Bunker understand that sometimes it’s best to share with the other children, as opposed to keeping all the copious money, glory, free Escalades, fine looking members of both sexes, and other spoils that come from writing in this space, for oneself.

In this spirit, we would like to have you all give a hearty and well-deserved hand to our newest member, The Head Rotor.

The Head Rotor has done many mysterious and beautiful things that one generally must hold an advanced scientific degree of some kind to understand fully.

Case in point:

What you cannot see from this mere-smear application of photons expressed in a digital format, is that the light that this little box expresses shimmers and utterly changes the way you perceive light, art, and the inherent nature of the universe itself.

It projects the very fabric of the space-time continuum onto your retinas, yea, into your very primordial hindbrain, and starts a sequence of events that changes the very fabric of your makeup as a human being.

It’s also shiny.

So everyone please welcome The Head Rotor, who will no doubt bring equally interesting and amusing tidbits to this little robot-infested corner of the web we call Suicidebots.

Audio is NSFW

Or rather, they look at rocks, pick up rocks, navigate rocks, and OMG they totally have Livejournals!

Say Hi to Mars Rover Spirit. . .



. . and give a big howdy to Mars Rover Opportunity

[via Memepool.
Thanks to Extreme Croquet and About Facts for the images.]

OK, so you’re too lazy to make a robot yourself.

But you like halloween.

And you surf the net all day long.

Cube potato, meet tele-skeleton:

Click the photo to go to the Tele Toyland website and tele-operate the six foot tall robotic skeleton.

In real time.

No really.

Welcome dedicated readers of Angela Gunn, who was ever so nice and gave us a lovely mention on the USA Today site today.

Also please note the shiny new Feedburner RSS link over yonder in the sidebar. It’s all kinds of compliant with all kinds of RSS feed readers, so update your feeds and be one of the cool kids. For the feed-knowledge-deficient clicking on the icon will open up whole worlds of explanations about what a feed is and why you want one.

The thing with most physical robots is that they look kinda boring. A PC with wheels and some 80/20 supports. Robots need to look more like, well… you know: Robots!

So occasionally we’ll post drawings/paintings/illustrations of robots. Which will hopefully inspire robot builders to make their bots more anthropomorphic. Or something.

The painting below is by Craig Berry. Who draws robots. And women. And vampires. It’s like, my three favorite things in the whole wide world!

Click the above photo for some more of Craig’s cool robot art.