The mighty works of Zenta, the Norwegian hexapod mastermind covered previously in these humble pages, have been discovered by none other than one of the the shining bastions of all things awesome, Popular Science. You all can now say you knew Zenta when.

It’s nice to see that the morphing robot has come such a long way since July.

MorpHex is the brainchild of Norwegian engineer Kare Halvorsen, aka Zenta, who chronicles his robot-building experience on his blog. It started as a cut-up globe from Toys ‘R’ Us, and now it has 25 servos and a Basicmicro ARC-32 board, which is not yet programmed to roll. But Halvorsen said that’s his next step. Watch it fold up its arms into a sphere and then gently unfold them to walk.

We have a spiffy little interview with Zenta, The Man Himself, which you may peruse if you care to do so.

Everybody congratulate Bentern on scooping Pop Sci, then tell him to GET BACK TO WORK.

The Dutch artist Erik Hobijn created something years ago that is so elegant and thought provoking, so shockingly glorious and well-executed, that it still causes a stir when its exhibited:

Delusions of Self-Immolation coats the skin of the willing volunteer in flame-resistant gel, then sets them on fire. Sets. Them. On. Fire.

This is the secret wet dream of the misanthropic deeply morbid machine-art loving soul of this author. It is goddamn beautiful.

From an interview with the artist:

There are three states on the machine which I call “rare”, “medium”, and “well done”. “Rare” means you survive without any wounds. “Medium” is more for, say, the SM session or for people who like pain to understand parts of life, or to have this experience of pain. The third possibility is death. It is possible to die in this machine; I just have to change the liquid, and I have to change the timing.

There is nothing that will make you feel more alive than art that can kill you.

[via the always superlative We Make Money Not Art and the lovely @evacide]

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.

Stanford University, that cute little green-belted school down Palo Alto way, has decided to make an AI class accessible to the mere mortal for free, online (link is nice article about the class from SF Gate, including a neat interview with Peter Norvig).

Here’s a picture of what kick-ass AI looks like

This in an of itself is swell, but what makes this full-blown bull goose awesome in our minds that people are actually lining up in rabid frothing online numbers to take it.

The class is going on now, so if you are keen you can soak up what they’ve already covered, and revel in the pure intellectual bliss of learning something just because it’s magnificent. You can pretend you are a gentleperson-scholar back in the day, when it was possible for a dedicated person of relative leisure to learn everything there was to know that was worth knowing.

Personally, I’m glad we found more stuff to noodle with.

Take Stanford’s Online AI Course, “Introduction to AI”

From Neatorama, of course:

It’s really hard to say anything snarky about that, it’s just beautiful,and still works. Boggles the mind, really.

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!]

Fighting an autocratic regime? Have a few things lying around in your machine shop? Why not create a rebel war robot to kill time while you fight vociferously for your cause? The whole world is watching!

All kidding aside, this piece from Al-Jazeera English shows rebel engineers building, among other things, armed power wheels, an ROV ammo resupply machine, and your basic shoulder mounted rocket launcher.

Notable quotes from ass-kicking Libyan engineering students:

“We want to use our weapons in a systematic way against those who take up arms against us. We hope they will not use their arms against civilians.”

“It’s strange going from being an engineering students to designing weapons, but we’ve seen many bad things in this war and I have to help the fighters and my people any way I can.”

“We don’t carry guns but we want to help save our people, budding ways which reduce loss of life, even against Gaddafi’s forces. Because we are against killing unless there is no choice, we don’t want to be like him and kill everyone.”

DIY shit just got real.

[Thanks Singularity Hub!]

Is the Rise of Wearable Electronics Finally Here?

Check out this article by Phillip Torrone chronicling the development of wearable electronic tech -  Ranging from music and video players/recording devices, to a huge variety of USB devices, and much much more!

I’ve always wanted to utilize my wrist real estate to my shoes for electronics of some kind. Many of the “wearables” I’m going to share are from my project archives, some are now “real,” and others are products that are out now. I think we’re finally entering an era where wearable electronics can look good and work well.

Mentioned in an earlier post dissecting Hero Jr., Jeri Ellsworth spotted in the depths of this article, this time with her Nintendo Purse!

Special thanks to Make Magazine.

The excessively intelligent and infuriatingly productive Jeri Ellsworth goes over her new-to-her Heathkit Hero Jr., lovingly extracted from here in the depths of the Robunker (We have five more. Get ‘em while they’re cutely obsolete!).

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!

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!

In these trying times, some thought must be given to the small respites afforded by life in the 21st century. With an eye to this, we here at The Robotics Society of America (a registered 501c3 educational nonprofit, whee) are holding the Third Annual BarBot, a celebration of cocktail robotics and culture:
Full details and advance tickets HERE!

Join us April 1-2, 2011 at Parisoma, 169 11th St (at Natoma) in San Francisco. Cocktails, robots, and swingin’ music. Who could ask for more?

Like its Austrian sister event RoboExotica, Barbot 2011 will address the bigger questions in relaxation technology: Can a true man-machine interface achieve true transparency? Will technology morph to keep pace with eventual ubiquitous computing expectations? Are the margaritas actually any good?

All these questions and more will be answered during the course of two nights with robot music, swingin’ robot atmosphere, groovy entities both organic and manufactured, and some hot, hot science.

What’s more, it will serve as a delightful benefit for that most worthy of causes, The Robotics Society of America (501c3, remember?), proceeds to go to putting on RoboGames, the world’s largest open robot competition, dedicated to learnin’ kids good about Science, Math, Engineering and Technology.

In order to have a truly superlative BarBot scene, however, we need to add to our already burgeoning field of robots YOUR WONDERFUL CREATIONS.

Do you have a cocktail bot lying around collecting dust? Do you have components kicking around just *begging* to be made into human-serving, pleasure-giving automata (or semi-automata, we’re not too picky. . .)? Do you have a robot already in progress that would benefit from a deadline? Have you always wanted to build a thing from scratch and just needed a purpose for it? Are you in the greater SF Bay Area?

Cash assistance available for the neediest an most interesting cases. This means YOU.

Contact sb at suicidebots dot com
(or fill out the contact form over yonder —–> (under Information Is Sexy))
and tell us tales of your creations! Be a part of cocktail robotics history!

This talk is as awesome as you might think it is. Cynthia is one of our heroines.