A nice and brief little article in Forbes about winkle wee swarming robots thought up and done by the Harvard Self Organizing Systems Research Group
Each tiny bot has two degrees of movement, and can communicate by bouncing infrared signals off the floor at each other, like a tiny, liquid-free game of robot beer pong.
Apropos of very little, my cockles are warmed by the fact that Forbes has a blog called “Robot Overlords”.
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!).
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.
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!
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.
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.
Thanks Singularity Hub!
So the other day, I got myself a Skype account and hunkered down in the living bunker of Uncanny Valley Estates (where we live and work and poke the robots with sticks) and spent an hour shooting the shit with a few interesting and intelligent people about The Future for the TWiT Fourcast podcast. It was fun.
This video is the result:
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.
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.
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:
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*.
Hurray for the fine folks at Makerbot, making 3d extrusion printing the new cool thingy.
Chiggity check out the livestream here!
CarNAYgie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab has done the thing with the stuff and the smart people, only this time, IT CLIMBS TREES.
Ray, it’s looking at me, Ray. . .
This is cool if only for the head control thing, and the ability to annihilate the people in the cube next to you.
Incidentally, SRL did the head control thing with the Air Launcher way that many years ago, but if you have FREAKIN’ LAZZORS and the will to destroy you tend to always be ahead of the curve.
[Thanks Botjunkie!]
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