So, Anybots has just announced that they are shipping their bouncing baby robots:

We could not be more thrilled over here, one, because OMG MOAR ROBOTS, and also we have been buds and supporters of Anybots for forever, and in fact have the wonderous Trevor Blackwell on his homemade Segway at RoboGames 2005, *and* we were the lucky ones that to have Monty come out and play way back when.

Congrats to everyone and we’ll see you for RoboGames 2011!

[Thanks to Lem Fugitt for the Monty video!]

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.

The BBC has a small piece on Polar Bears whaling on remote-controlled robotic cameras designed to unobtrusively chart the bears in their natural habitat in Svalbard, Norway. This splendid piece of observation and film-making yielded some really gorgeous footage of polar bears being polar bears*, which includes some spectacular ingenuity in the field of tearing the living hell out of the electronics.

The cameras used for a documentary on polar bears were designed to be as unobtrusive and resilient as possible.

Polar Bear: Spy on The Ice used hi-tech “spy cams” to get as close as possible to the bears during summer in the Arctic islands of Svalbard.

But while they were built to withstand temperatures as low as -40C, in the end most could not cope with the curiosity displayed by their subjects.

The producer must have wept, then wet him/herself at the prospect of what was in the camera afterwards.

Thanks Paul Saffo!

*OMG SO FLUUUFFYYYY!!

Going through my backlog, I find this adorable round-up on the Makezine blog of hard core robots that at bleepin’ scary to watch in action.

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!

Endless astonished assonance as Audi ascends sans homo sapiens:

It was a controlled experiment with a chase car and few outside observers, but the car made it up Pike’s Peak at speeds of up to 45 mph. Humans can do it in 10 minutes, the robot did it in 27, but the terrain, elevation, and the fact that the freakin’ car did it all by its lonesome is awfully impressive.

Go Stanford.

Thanks Singularity Hub!

Ladies and Gentlemen, the HAMDAS-R:

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.]

The Institute For The Future has recently made available a lovely infographic on the impending takeover of the robot hordes from their idiot-fleshling creators.

It’s beautiful!

Seriously, look at this thing, I am willing to sell myself out to Our Robot Overlords just on the basis of its stunning design. Thought-provoking, well researched and a part of the IFTF’s program The Future Of Human-Machine Interaction, this is pretty much the official pronouncement that the robots of science fiction are and will be, in fact, not fiction any more:

After decades of hype, false starts, and few successes, smart machines are finally ready for prime time. As part of its 2010 research, IFTF’s Technology Horizons program has created the Robot Renaissance: the Future of Human-Machine Interaction Map to explore this new robotic future.

Doomsday or dyn-o-mite? The end of the human race as we know it or just a wonderfully augmented reality? Whatever the process, it makes the future a pretty interesting place to live in.

Why Living In The Future is awesome part 54765: Robot Astronauts! The last voyage of Space Shuttle Discovery was scratched until later in the month last week, but it’ll be worth waiting for because Robonaut, my favorite “Maybe this will someday happen” NASA project, will be large and in charge (okay maybe not *in charge*) on the flight, as a full-fledged crew member.

A Robonaut is a dexterous humanoid robot built and designed at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Our challenge is to build machines that can help humans work and explore in space. Working side by side with humans, or going where the risks are too great for people, Robonauts will expand our ability for construction and discovery. Central to that effort is a capability we call dexterous manipulation, embodied by an ability to use one’s hand to do work, and our challenge has been to build machines with dexterity that exceeds that of a suited astronaut.

And because we live In The Future, you can find out all about the mission schedule and progress by following RoboNaut’s Twitter Stream.

[Thanks Dale Larson!]

Popular Science has an article about a clever use for a Turing Test bot: arguing with climate change deniers.

Getting into a climate change debate on Twitter could be even more exhausting than it sounds now that a software developer named Nigel Leck has automated the process. Tired of arguing with climate change deniers in 140 character quips, the programmer wrote a script to do it for him. Chatbot @AI_AGW scans Twitter every five minutes searching for hundreds of phrases that fit the usual denier argument paradigm. Then it serves them up some science.

Those responses are pulled from a database of hundreds of responses that the software matches up to the argument made by the original tweeter. Those who claim the entire solar system is warming are met with something like: “Sun’s output has barely changed since 1970 & is irrelevant to recent global warming” followed by a link to corresponding scientific research.

It doesn’t detect sarcasm, but as far as we can tell, neither do climate change deniers.

I agree with PopSci that Hacker News sums it up best:

On the one hand the idea of a reverse search engine is somewhat appealing, on the other hand; it’s Clippy for the internet.

> I see you’re trying to deny global warming. Would you like to:

1. research the available facts and science?

2. Have an authority figure you trust tell you, you’re wrong?

3. Meet other like-minded singles?

[Did I say posting would resume Tuesday? That was a filthy lie.]

Mind if I retweet? @rstevens

Every Halloween comic I’ve ever done. CRISIS on 8-Bit Earth:

Let’s count all the robots! Heather Knight, doctoral candidate at CarNAYgie Mellon University, is embarking on this noble project. I like how she openly addresses that this project will raise the question of just what a robot is, in the first place.

“Data gathering for the U.S. 2010 Census may be finished, but it has just begun for the Robot Census 2010. Heather Knight, a first-year PhD student in the Robotics Institute, has launched the unprecedented effort to count every robot residing in Carnegie Mellon University’s laboratories.

The idea occurred to Knight and her fellow first-years after listening to faculty presentations during this term’s grad student immigration course. “As much as we’re here for the professors,” she explained, “we’re also here for the robots.” With no full accounting available of CMU robots – much less a list of the coolest robots with the wackiest names — the obvious next step was a census.

Knight and her designer friend Chris Becker created a Interactive PDF Form, seeking information regarding the status, year of creation and location of each robot, and distributed it within the Robotics Institute via email. Though she has requested that forms be filled out and returned by Sept. 8, she realizes nothing is that simple for a census taker. “It raises the question, of course, of what is a robot,” she noted. And busy professors already are handing the forms off to busy grad students. “I suspect it will require a fair amount of door-to-door footwork to get this finished,” she added.

Let the good robot bar conversations begin!

The Vth Annual Combots Cup is upon us!

The Combots Cup: like the Stanley Cup, except MORE METAL.

Combots Cup V
Saturday, Oct 23rd 2:00pm – 7:00pm
Sunday, October 24th, 2:00pm – 7:00pm
at San Mateo County Event Center, San Mateo, California
GETCHER TICKETS HERE!

SEE heavyweight fighting robot behemoths like Last Rites and Sewer Snake wipe the walls with each other inside our custom built bulletproof arena!

THRILL to all the good parts of a NASCAR crash without all that pesky danger to human life! All the excitement of monster trucks, but up close and extremely personal!

FLAME THROWERS! SPINNING BLADES OF DOOM! HYPER-PSI STEEL FLIPPERS OF NASTINESS!

Also, a fine example of the benefits of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math education and continued learning through the power of the nascent DIY and home-based Maker movement.

MEET the builders, learn the stats, get robot schwag and say you were there! Fun for the whole family if your family likes TOTAL ROBOT DESTRUCTION!

GET YOUR TICKETS TO COMBOTS CUP V get a nice juicy discount when you purchase in advance on the web!

STAY to the bitter end and find out who wins part of the $3500 prize purse – and who goes home in a bucket!

Grab your beer and popcorn, grease up your sprockets, and for cripe’s sake don’t tell the kids it’s educational COMBOTS CUP V – YOUR FUTURE ROBOT OVERLORDS WILL SEE YOU THERE.

Photo Courtesy Buzzsugar

The White House identifies robots as a darn good thing in which to get interested:

In July, the heads of the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy identified robotics as one of the Administration’s R&D priorities for the President’s FY2012 budget.

Robotics is an important technology because of its potential to advance national needs such as homeland security, defense, medicine, healthcare, space exploration, environmental monitoring and remediation, transportation, advanced manufacturing, logistics, services, and agriculture. Robotics is also nearing a tipping point in terms of its usefulness and versatility as technologies such as software, chips, and computer vision continue to improve.

OSTP has been working with Federal agencies and the research community to identify concrete steps that the Administration can take to promote U.S. leadership in robotics.

Robotics Technology Development and Deployment! OR (wait for it. . .):

RTD2!

A big bloop bloop whistle shriek to everyone applying for this grant.

[Thanks Ken Goldberg!]

Hurray for the fine folks at Makerbot, making 3d extrusion printing the new cool thingy.

Chiggity check out the livestream here!