All new and shiny in time for ICRA comes the Robotad all-volunteer blog for the discussion of the use of robots during disasters such as the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima crisis.

Do you read and speak Japanese well? They need volunteers to translate articles! Hone your anime-watching skills and put them to good use:

The Robotics Task Force for Anti-Disaster (ROBOTAD) is a community of volunteers in Japan who gather to exchange and discuss the issues of technology, application, and management to utilize robotics toward
recovery from the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Disaster. The ROBOTAD is a hyper-academic organization and tightly liaises with academic societies, the Science Council of Japan, and the industry. The ROBOTAD is chaired by Professor Hajime Asama, the University of Tokyo.

The Robotics Task Force

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.

So mumble mumble behind in posting blah blah catch-up blarg overbooked blah excuses excuses blah blah Robot Round-Up yeehaw. Blah blah blah:

Robot Marathon blah blah Osaka prattle blab Vstone Japan blah Robovie blah blah Robot-Dreams blah blah ACTUAL INTERVIEW IN RUNNER’S WORLD (kinda) whoo robot athletes blah. [Pithy comment blah RoboGames blah blah]

Blah Cheetahbot blahblah vroom.

Blah Honda U3-X not as spylike as it sounds blah blah Honda Robotics sponsor us blah.

OMG BLAH WOOT PETER WELLER blah ROBOCOP STATUE ZOMGROXXORS VIDEO

Okay now that we are all caught up we over here, we will do our best to actually blog about something other than cocktail robots or RoboGames for a change. I promise.

[Thank you The BBC, Robots-Dreams, Vstone, Technabob, Runner's World, PopSci, Honda, and as always, LaughingSquid.]

Hey all you Mechwarriors kung fu fighters and RoboOne aspirants, here’s a nice hack that will definitely make you the belle of the competition in April

Although if Taylor Veltrop, humanoid roboticist and Kinect hacker extraordinaire, shows up to RoboGames, you guys are going to have some scrambling to do:

The robot is based on the ever-popular KHR-1 humanoid platform, and tweaked with ROS and the electronics have been replaced with a RoBoard.

[PSSST- Register for RoboGames HERE!]

Gritty, we got gritty. West Oakland, CA, is not really the place for a family picnic on a Sunday afternoon, unless your family picnics involved metal recycling, used needle avoidance and occasionally fire (ours do, but I am told we tend to be the exception).

Alliance metal in West Oakland is one of those places to take your used robot combat arena for a little bit of quick cash to trade for that new speed controller or TI billet you have your eye on. Also, crack.

However, the constant rattle of shopping carts and danger of having your car, yard and person stripped for recyclables is abated somewhat, because they have some amazing art, made entirely out of junk, out front.

From Oaktown Art:

On the other hand, the center does provide a means of income for those who seemingly have no other means. Unfortunately, many of those people take their hard-earned cash and promptly smoke it or shoot it, leaving a trail of associated unpleasantries throughout the adjacent residential blocks. sigh.

Kal Spelletich, Robot Artist extraordinaire, does things with machines that should be marginally illegal, and probably are. He is having a show this Saturday in San Francisco, which you should go to if you are geographically situated.

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:

In our ongoing quest to post absolutely nothing of hard scientific value this week whatsoever, we bring you the tiny shenanigans of Mike the Robot, submitted to us eons ago via The Contact Form (remember The Contact Form?).

Jack Dow chronicles the everyday doings of his little pal Mike The Robot. This photo set is just gorgeously turned out. Also: Giggling.

The whole shebang is well worth poring over at length.

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.

Randall Munroe, the statistic-toting genius behind the webcomic XKCD has been playing with Remotely Operated Vehicles from Nventivity for fun and no profit.

It’s a very basic kit designed to use off-the-shelf parts as much as possible, to encourage people to play with the design or expand on it. I’ve gotten a lot of help and some cool ideas from the company founder, Dr. Karen Suhm, who coaches robotics teams in ROV-building competitions and generally knows everything about ROVs. The kit comes with a good set of underwater motors and a sensitive camera, and this summer I started modifying it to use an Arduino and joystick control, running the whole thing over Cat-5 cable (which significantly lightened the tether). This will also let me add other equipment, like a still camera, depth gauge, compass, and sonar.

Dig the binary zip-tie depth finder, O Dweeby Beloveds.

Also, Randall Munroe has been going through a thing or two lately, everybody head over to Xkcd and give him snuggles, just because.

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!]

Mind if I retweet? @rstevens

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

We are breaking the radio silence to note our presence at a few events this past weekend in the Greater NYC area, and to formally announce our surprise that there are whole subsections of the population who do not need to be told that “fire” is “hot” when under the influence of alcohol.

Super mega huge thanks to Bar2D2 and his people, Jamie and Julie Price, for coming out from Tennessee and showing their stuff. Here are Jamie and Julie at Maker Faire NYC, in the Great Hall at the New York Hall of Science.

Photo Courtesy Laughing Squid’s Maker NYC Flickr Stream

Here is another shot of Bar2D2 (the blue blur in the lower left) meeting his public at the Diesel-sponsored Superglued/Gawker Media Silent Rave.

This was a rooftop soiree for young and adorable media types who flocked to Gawker headquarters in lower Manhattan somewhere in order to get their high-energy drink on to the lilting strains of The Eclectic Method*. The “silent rave” part came when they busted the headphones out at ten pm to outsmart the amplified noise ordinances. Everyone was bopping and rocking with the headphones on while simultaneously talking over the loud music being projected into their gently tipsy brainmeats.

El Espanol Borracho made appearances as well, which were warmly regarded, but unfortunately no one seems to have any pics of the 95 consecutive flaming absinthe shots it dispensed in two hours at the Maker Day NYC party. If you or your next of kin have photos, we here at SB.com would very greatly appreciate them and reward you richly with robot stickers and alcohol.

UPDATE: Jason Naumoff thoughtfully forwards one of these official photos taken at the MakerFaire/Red Bull Create The Future event of Borracho in action:

Yours truly operating El Espanol Borracho, hair pulled back because there’s FIRE.

Borracho, sadly, did not make an appearance at the Gawker Party due to physics and a refusal of the management to believe that nether it nor its operator have ever set anything on fire *unintentionally*. Any disappointed fans of fire please write in to Rave 2010, c/o Gawker NYC and lodge your complaints.

Anyhow, a good time was had by all, the media flowed freely, as did the booze, and we look forward to continuing to gently gloat about parties we get paid to go to in the future, for your reading enjoyment.

*Not particularly germane to this post but we had to say something: Eclectic Method slaughtered with their remixes of David Bowie plus Rick James and Lady Gaga with the Talking Heads and Marvin Gaye and I think they quoted Buckaroo Banzai in there somewhere too, maybe, it’s all a blur. I don’t even like DJs, but these guys win. We even have it on good authority that Laughing Squid‘s Primary Tentacle himself would have come out if he knew they were playing, and he had *heatstroke*.