So, for a little background: Stephen Nelson is one of our favorite people that most of the six of you who check this site regularly have never heard of. He builds things like power tool racers and, more importantly, robots.

His stable include Evelyn, a Modified Dawg (watch out, 16mg video download); Eva, the beer retriever, and his latest and gnarliest creation, Ethel, (named for the Zappa song). As Mr. Nelson says, “The goal of building Ethel is a learning experience with software and vision system on a off road robot.” At least this was the goal when he started, she has since sprouted a flamethrower and a portable DJ rig, amongst other things. But I digress.

I will now turn over the tale of the latest adventures with Ethel to Mr. Nelson himself posting from his garage while nursing his road rash:

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I have been inundated with these photos, which are cool, so I am passing the savings on to you:

Lobsterbots, LEMURs, ATHELETEs, Mr. Wu, NASA rovers, Big Dogs, plant putters, dino bots, rescue remedies, warehouse automatons, Philip K. Dicks and mechanical men, from all over the world, rendered in breathtaking technicolor.

If this doesn’t bring it home that robots are already the big thing. . .Mr. Saffo? Any comments?

[Thanks to Scott Beale and RICK! for the links]

The advent of this robot clearly means Rosie the Robot is imminent, so people can stop asking, already.

From Bre Pettis and Adam Cechetti, here are the fruits of a long, punchy night at NYC Resistor:

Bre has established that Skynet will enable itself via tasty cheese-filled snacks:

This is one of those robots that I swear is alive. The noises it made were like an animal and it seemed that everytime we looked the other way, it was coming to life and changing things with the setup.

It shows that the revolution will come via Arduino and reprap controllers, and will be commented on by XKCD.

Found this thanks to the always awesome Lem, who got it from I-Wei, because I-Wei lives the life you wish you had:

More posts up soon if my brain ever resembles something that is not oatmeal or boiled millet.

Mister Robotics is still in Tokyo (Follow him on Twitter!), and after a month of sustained human contact I believe the Rotor is presiding in-self contained splendor in the Fortress Of Solitude, so It’s all me until then. And I like I said, my brain is millet.

Because why carve with a knife if you can carve with a FRIKIN’ LASER?

Douglas Repetto, Robot Talent Show Man In The Field and Dorkbot Representative for Planet Earth, sends us some delicous pics of his pumpkin carving extravaganza:

More pics and movies of the lazorz in action at Doug’s website.

It’s getting gently hectic here in The Uncanny Valley, what with us heading off for points south for MakerFaire Austin, but here is a neat thing that appeared in my inbox this morning:

It is a giant mechanical flower that opens and closes at dawn and dusk, made by students at the University Of Buenos Aires in Argentina.

Raise a glass and wipe a tear from your eye. Alvin, that intrepid Navy explorer famed for exploring the Titanic with Dr. Robert Ballard’s team at Woods Hole, is heading for the great metal front porch. He will be replaced by leaner, meaner, raw cast titanium whipper snapper that is costing some 50 million dollars.

From the NYT:

The new vehicle is to replace Alvin, which was the first submersible to illuminate the rusting hulk of the Titanic and the first to carry scientists down to discover the bizarre ecosystems of tube worms and other strange creatures that thrive in icy darkness.

The United States used to have several submersibles — tiny submarines that dive extraordinarily deep. Alvin is the only one left, and after more than four decades of probing the sea’s depths it is to be retired. Its replacement, costing some $50 million, is to go deeper, move faster, stay down longer, cut the dark better, carry more scientific gear and maybe — just maybe — open a new era of exploration.

I personally will definitely be pouring one out for my junked homie; discovering the Titanic and all the attendant wonder of deep sea exploration made realize how bitchin’ science actually is. Alvin is where the scientists who deployed Argo the ROV and Jason the autonomous submersible were stationed.

Badass leader of robots, we salute you.

Enjoy your retirement.

[via Gizmodo and the Grey Lady]

So if wiggling ICE-powered donkey’s weren’t bad enough, Boston Dymanics now gives us robotic spidermen. Well, spiderbugs… (is that redundant?)

RiSE is a small six-legged robot that climbs vertical terrain such as walls, trees and fences. RiSE’s feet have claws, micro-claws or sticky material, depending on the climbing surface. RiSE changes posture to conform to the curvature of the climbing surface and a fixed tail helps RiSE balance on steep ascents. RiSE is about 0.25 m long, weighs 2 kg, and travels 0.3 m/s.

Each of RiSE’s six legs is powered by two electric motors. An onboard computer controls leg motion, manages communications, and services a variety of sensors. The sensors include an inertial measurement unit, joint position sensors for each leg, leg strain sensors and foot contact sensors.

Future versions of RiSE will use dry adhesion to climb sheer vertical surfaces such as glass and metal. Boston Dynamics is developing RiSE in conjunction with researchers at University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, Stanford, and Lewis and Clark University. RiSE is funded by the DARPA Defense Sciences Office.

All those beautiful, beautiful visions spinning about in your head have been made into gorgeous alcoholic reality. Ladies and gentlemen, Bar2D2:

Bar2D2 is capable of making your basic cocktails, and also incorporates a beer elevator to put a frosty brew into your hands upon request. The beer elevator is the business bits of a Harbor Freight electric caulking gun.

The base is a electric power chair, and he can schmooze with the cocktail crowd with his extensive R2D2 vocabulary, courtesy an R2D2 voice module and a Team Delta RCE210 relay board.

The beer elevator is enclosed by a spiffy polycarbonate cocoon, and the ice bucket lights up.

How prosh can a cocktail-slinging robot get??

Jamie Price, the builder, has a great set of photos of his progress here.

Bar2D2 has been a scant five months in the making, by a guy who has a day job and everything. Jamie credits stick-to-itiveness and BAD (Beer Aided Design) for his success.

Here’s his parts list:

My goal:
Create an rc bot that is loosely (very) modeled after R2D2 for the sole purpose of being a mobile bar/entertainment center.

Features:
Clear lexan dome that houses a 6 liquor bottle carousel
Cups that have LED color shift (damn I love ebay)
Motorized Ice bin (remotely actuated)
Beer dispensing elevator (remotely actuated)
Neon, LED lighting accents
Motorized drivetrain
R2D2 sound effects
12 volt sla powered with on board ac/dc wall converter for long party times
2 victor 883 escs
futaba 6 channel radio
materials: metal, 3/4″ finish grade ply, sintra, lexan, chrome, plastic

If all goes well (and it has been!) Bar2D2 will be accepting his public and signing autographs at DragonCon in Atlanta, Georgia, August 29-September 1st (that’s next weekend campers!).

We’re also hoping Bar2D2 makes it to Vienna for RoboExotica this year.

[via The Robot Fighting League Forum]

Lem over at Robots-Dreams was musing about this pic he came across on the interwebs, and wanted to know more about it.

Well, my friends, this robot is the work of a robot freak from Oakland, California named Justin Grey, whom we have had the pleasure and privilege of working with on many occasions. Justin builds gorgeous fire-based instruments of irresistible destruction.

I have asked him for more info about his newest creature, but in the meantime here is a video of a robot he made last year, named Robot Libby after his dog:

See more of his work at his blog.

For those of you sitting around doing frak-all with your Saturday night (like me), I present an oldie but a goodie:

From RoboCentral:

AquaJelly is an artificial autonomous jellyfish with an electric drive and an intelligent, adaptive mechanical system. AquaJelly consists of a translucent hemisphere and eight tentacles used for propulsion. At the centre of the AquaJelly is a watertight, laser-sintered pressure vessel. This comprises a central, electric drive, two lithium-ion-polymer batteries, the charge control device and the servo motors for the swashplate.

Auf Deutch von Festo.com.

[via DesignNews]

Artifical Intelligence and Robotics alerts us to this nifty little contest that the fun-lovin’ folks over at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2008) thought up and did.

The winner has been announced, but we hope they will do it again next year!

So, for all of you playing along at home, you know that long, long ago, in a living room far, far away we had these nifty little sticker numbers for sale on this very website:

They were extremely popular (by “extremely” I of course mean at least three people, including my mother, got one and now wear them proudly on whatever they stuck them to).

Then came the dark times, the times before the empire when we forgot where we put them or we were too drunk to remember where we put them, or couldn’t find them because the moody lighting in the Fortress of Solitude kept distracting us, something. We didn’t have any, in any case.

Mister Robotics, however, in a bid to continue procrastinating on things that actually need to be done, re-did the design and ordered a whole passel more.

The upshot, my dear readers, is that we have ‘em in stock again. You may think ThinkGeek might have cornered the market on these, but you can only get ‘em here, from the design that we rightfully stole (Thanks Toast!) a measly $3.00 each (cheap!).

Click on the image above or get ‘em from the image in the sidebar over yonder.

Stick these things to other things and make your inanimate objects happy.

Giant mechanical spiders take away some of the hurt in the world:

Just *listening* to it is awesome. See the giant stompy monster action from a different angle here.

[Thanks Alexander Rose! Merci Beaucoup pur les fotos, Tristian Sabatier!

One of the cool things about RoboGames is all the people we meet from different walks of life. Most are not engineers. Many are artists, some are blue-collar workers, some kids, some white-collar, some retirees…. You get the picture.

Of all the many people I’ve met, one of the most talented is I-Wei Huang, who made the above steam powered robots. He’s also a creator, animator, rigger, screen play writer, and voice talent (yes, he really is that multi-talented) and he’s currently looking for a job.

If you’re in need of an amazingly talented robot builder, animator, illustrator, thinker, or doer, I-Wei is your guy (in my experience, work ethic is more important than IQ or talent, but I-Wei has all three in spades). Look at the below examples, and then recruit him.

I must say, I-Wei has the single greatest resume I’ve ever seen. I wish that I had the balls to write a resume like that.