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.

Further proof that the Netherlands is still cooler than we are:

Payment is automatic too. It just magically gets debited from one’s account. Way to never, ever have to get out of the car ever again. As The Rotor Says, “I Love Living In The Future!”.

Further reading over at Reuters.

So seeing as the denizens of SuicideBots have a think for Kraut rock, eclectica and robotics, the delightful Scott Beale over at Laughing Squid sent me this Muxtape this morning:

Muxtape apparently is the future’s substitute for sitting around late on a Friday night, mucking around with your dad’s stereo equipment, making that special mix for the cute person in Biology so they’ll share your, um, headphones with you later. Only you can do it in like, seventeen seconds, instead of spending hours trying to figure out why the aux isn’t talking to the receiver and looking for that one cable with the thing on the end that you need ’cause the amp is some weird european thing that doesn’t interface with any of your other components ’cause Dad is a sound nerd and said the sooner you figured it out yourself the better off you’d be, and something chewed through your last good speaker cable so you have to use the shit ones and it’s a good thing the person you’re making it for is totally worth it, because the time you’ve already invested in this, the perfect mixtape, will probably cause you to have another panic attack in Trig because you’re underslept and didn’t do the homework, but it’s almost time for Dr. Demento so you have to take a break and that’s a good thing anyway because you’re pretty sure you blew something up turning the power on in the wrong order.

What was I talking about?

Anyway, listen to this awesome Muxtape by LaughingSquid, and rock out with your robot out.

OB Shop Tip: Music in the shop is important for productivity. Mr. Robotics finds hard rock good for concentration. The Head Rotor enjoys things like this. I personally like Rick Astley.

[Thank you Scott and Boing Boing]

UPDATE: Scott actually came across this playlist in his rss feeds this morning, but didn’t make it himself. Sorry for any confusion!

In an effort to shamelessly promote the extreme cleverness of what we do behind the scenes here at Suicidebots, and to prove that we can walk the walk as well as roll the servos, we would like to humbly bring to your attention to an exciting new partnership with Make Magazine:

Nothing says “robot” like an android. So lets make one of our own! This course will take you through the steps of building your own android. You’ll leave with a working, foot tall programmable android! You can use it for kung-fu matches, dancing, stair-climbing or many other events. Humanoid is designed to be remote controlled, but can be used autonomously by adding sensors. The course is only $599, and you walk with an an android and the know-how to program it.

This is an excellent opportunity to break into robotics if you’ve never done it before. It’s also a great opportunity to get a competition-ready robot in time to register for RoboGames!

This class is taking place in the San Francisco Bay Area, so all you Bay Area thinkers, makers, and wannabe roboticists, come out and play!

And yet, it is high-larious. At least for me. But I’m easy.

There are some freaking stupendous papercraft artists out there, but nothing beats this excellent mock up of an *actual piece of paper!*:

Yeah, they could have just had it up on the laptop screen like everyone else, but they used offset printing and probably raised embossed lettering to get that real, authentic “paper” effect! Wow! You just can’t do that with a laser printer nowadays.

It makes me long for older, more authentic-feeling technology. Maybe that’s why Steampunk is so popular.

[Via Laughing Squid via Robot Pirate Monkey]

Or Passover, whatever.

I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE FOR THE SOUNDTRACK! AAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA [cough]

Those clever Aussies. Really now.

A Man Built a Robot To Kill Him. And Succeeded.

An 81-year-old man from Burleigh Heads, Australia, downloaded plans to build a killer robot from the Internet, built the complex machine, and then used it to kill himself in his driveway.

Big Dog, Blah blah Boston Dynamics Etc etc Little Dog, DARPA d3ThB0t, etc etc, BTDT.

But none of that makes up for how freakin’ eerie this thing is.

I swear to god I thought of this years ago. But my dogs don’t chase balls, so I never got around to building one.

Anyway, for those people too lazy to even throw a ball for their dog… I give you:

Or rather it would be, if Chassis were not a lover, but a fighter.

Dallas Native Designs Fetching Robot

Charlie Kemp, a transplanted Dallasite and current director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Healthcare Robotics, recently unveiled a new robot he designed that retrieves an object after you’ve highlighted it with a green laser pointer.

Sound boring?

Then think of it this way: the beer fetcher.

Granted, Kemp and his team are talking about the health care applications of their automaton, dubbed El-E, but we all know this is about getting your Duff without getting off your duff (Duffman says, can’t get enough of that wonderful Duff. Oh, yeah!). . .

. . .Of course, if El-E does get into the bartender game, he’ll (she’ll? it’ll?) have to compete with the less cutting-edge but more aesthetically pleasing Chassis the beer-pouring robot.

[Via The Dallas Morning News Technology Blog]

Finally, here is a little snippet of video of Chassis being put through his beer-serving paces. Notice the Head Rotor operating in the background, and Al Honig adjusting my grip on the robot’s. . . um. . .appendage.

Congrats to Al and The Rotor, Chassis is a heck of a guy. And shiny!

In the “See “More” but after the video ends, there is lots and lots of coverage of RoboGames 2007! Lots of which was uploaded by Lem Fugitt! Thanks Robots Dreams!

So maybe androids don’t dream of electric sheep, but thanks to a new project by artists Brendan Burns and Fernando Orellana, they can dance about the electric sheep *you* dream of:

Using recorded brainwave activity and eye movements during REM sleep to determine robot behaviors and head positioning, “Sleep Waking” acts as a way to “play-back” dreams. Through this piece we hope to investigate one of the possible human-robot relationships.

We Make Money Not Art has a nice interview with both the artists about thier piece and what it means for human-machine interaction and robot world peace.