So, we here who put on RoboGames were standing around shooting the breeze with our good pals at Lagunitas Brewing the other day.

“Gosh,” we said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get together a bunch of neat people and drink beer and talk about robots?”

“Yeah!”, said Jimmy J, General Organization Guy and Pony Ride Attendant up at Lagunitas, “It would also be cool to have a backyard barbecue with robot people, robots, and big lumps of tasty goodness to wash all that beer and conversation down with!”

“Golly,” said Mister Robotics, “It would sure be neat to do all that *and* have it be a fundraiser for RoboGames 2009!”

“Wow!” Said Ron, Lagunitas Sales Honcho, “I’ll bet that if we package up a fun afternoon of beer-becuing, robots, music and nifty surprises, and had it all up here in our super spiffy beer-tasting loft overlooking the Lagunitas Brewery, we could get a ton of people out here and get people excited about RoboGames 2009 at the same time!”

“My God Man!” we said, pouring ourselves another fine Imperial Stout, “You beer guys are Geniuses! That’s what we’ll do! We’ll invite a ton of people up to beautiful Petaluma, ply them with food, drinks, free tickets to RoboGames and other robotic delights, and let them know that their ticket money goes to helping put on a stunning show of technological wizardry and sportsmanlike excitement! The RoboGames!”

And so it was thought up, an so it shall be done:

The RoboGames Lagunitas Beer Party!
A Fundraiser for The International RoboGames 2009
Saturday, May 16th, 2009 – 4:20-8:00pm
$50/ticket gets you:

• All you can eat BBQ (dude, that’s like a $30 value)
• All you can drink (but not drive) beer (oh come on… That’s worth $100)
• All you can listen to live music ($10 cover…)
• One ticket to RoboGames in June (hey, that’s a $20 value right there…)
• Tour of the Lagunitas brewery and bottling plant (oh, at least $10)
• Chance to get autographs from Team “Beer Bash“, the flame-throwing, combat robot made from a beer keg (worth at least 25¢. )
• Opportunity to drive a real combat robot (priceless. Friggen, priceless.)
• and on and on. . .

So like, $170.25 of food, beer, and stuff for just $50!!! Buy Tickets here!

Lagunitas Brewing Company
1280 North McDowell Boulevard
Petaluma, CA 94954
21 and up only, please.

Only 100 lucky party-going people will be able to party with us at Lagunitas!

Your tickets gets you entry to the Lagunitas Robot Lounge, free food, free beer, a pair of tickets to the International Robogames, a goody bag stuffed with robotic delights and satisfaction in knowing that your drunken revelry goes towards making RoboGames 2009 better than ever this year!

Think of the children! And their robots!

Clicking below will embark you on this magnificent journey. See you at Lagunitas!
Buy Tickets here!

Thank you to our good friends (and sponsors of RoboGames 2009),

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:

(more…)

Dude.

I mean, wow.

The website pretty much says it all:

On March 24 from 1-5 PM EST hadto.net and FutureFarmers will be conducting a workshop called Human Powered Chatbot as part of the Reverse Ark at Baltimore Contemporary.

20 people will cooperate in a system of abstraction through simple rules to create a writing machine that will be connected to the internet via the Twitter and New York Times APIs

If you are interested in conversing with the Human Powered Chatbot you can follow it at http://twitter.com/human_bot on March 24 from 1-5 PM EST

During this time you can reply to ‘human_bot’ on twitter and it will respond to your messages.

[Thanks Bruce Sterling!]

Seriously, how has no one thought of this earlier? Aside,of course, from the whole “oh my god I just lost my finger” thing:

Geek Replaces Lost Finger With 2GB USB Finger

A Finnish programmer who lost his finger in a motorcycle accident has now replaced it with a prosthetic finger that has a USB drive built in. Jerry Jalava can now peel back his “nail” and reveal a 2GB “finger drive” for storing photos, movies and software.

Jalava had his left ring finger amputated last summer after crashing into a deer with his motorbike near the Finnish capital Helsinki. Given his profession as a computer programmer, the doctors treating him joked that he should have a USB “finger drive” and Jalava went for the idea.

[Thanks Vexed Magazine! (we found this through their twitter feed, which we have had for a while now.]

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.

So back a couple days ago I mentioned I-Wei Huang, who is still cooler than you and sheds mechanical ninja-fu like some people shed viruses. Well, he’s shown up again, saving me from actually having to look for something good to post:

Embrace the Crab-Fu, people.

This video is NSFW and NSF just about anyone who isn’t completely comfy with hardcore juicy robot sexytimes (Rotor I’m lookin’ at you)

Yet, it is oddly compelling.

[Thanks(?) David Fine]

RoboGames fave Kazu Terasaki demonstrates an incredibly cute concept in iPhone add-ons: if your phone rings, why should you go fetch it? in this day an age, make it come to you!

Kazu has developed a kit for making just about anything into a walking robot, a la this iPhone, check it out here (some assembly and Japanese language skills required)!

[via robots.net and Norri!]

[Yes, thank you I know video posts are a cop-out. I imagine someone might have something intelligent to say at some point around here, I promise. Many thanks to the adorable and Vienna-bound Head Rotor for holding down the fort for us for a while; it's been hectic around here]

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.

Channel Nine’s priorities are straight, of course, in a data set where giant killer bipedal robots firing airsoft pellets are top priority. Which they are. So have a watch and get all slobbery over MechWars, and then build one and inhale the awesome.

This Week on C9: Dynamic Silverlight, VSTS, buying Caio, and Mech Wars

[Thanks Andrew!]

Gizmodo has posed a short video of Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage of Mythbusters painting the Mona Lisa in less than a second:

They start the demo by bringing out their trusty paintball-enabled r/c swivel arm robot, which demonstrates the concept by firing a happy face on the wall. Ooh! Variable speed!

I agree with Gizmodo’s assessment, seeing as the demo was only tangentially apropos to the premise, which was the difference between CPUs and GPUs:

The sheer ridiculousness of this demonstration makes its questionable veracity completely, totally, seriously excusable.

Because everybody knws that if your demo is awesome enough, you can get away with a small amount of bad science.

Cedric Dupont, engineer for Volkwagen and collaborator on Stanford’s DARPA Grand Challenge team, has written an enchanting article on building Stanley for the 2005 DARPA grand Challenge.

Why Stanley? Stanford was originally planning to use a Ford SUV for this project, and Mike thought it would be clever to call the robot “Stan” (Stanford, get it? I thought you would). Obviously this joke did not work with the VW Touareg, and the team chose “roadrunner” as the new codename. In fact most of Mike’s original code still refers to “roadrunner”. A few months later, when the time came to have our first press event we revisited the issue of naming. Both Pamela Mahoney (our liaison with major sponsor MDV) and myself felt that “Roadrunner” did not sound likeable enough, and there was also a brief consideration of trademark issues (Plymouth produced a Road Runner). Reminiscing the early Stan I proposed Stanley, which was deemed to sound more friendly, “human” and somehow recalled the pioneering/exploratory dimension of this project. And so the car was christened. Anecdotically, in the summer of 2005 Joe and I built a duplicate as back up, that we dubbed “Stanlette”. It was a near perfect copy, with a few minor differences in the skidplate and bumper guard, an improved electric system and a more modern engine (the 6-cyl TDI). For the record, we never had to use our backup and it is the original Stanley, the same one that survived thousands of miles of testing that conquered the Darpa Grand Challenge.

Stanley was installed at the Smithsonian in 2006.

[Thanks Lem!]

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.

Crabfu likes it! Everyone wins!

The fine folks at Trossen Robotics recently sent I-Wei Huang of Crab Fu (swash bots, steam beasts, other things mere plebes like we can only dream of creating) , a Bioloid kit from Robotis. I-wei messed around with it and deemed it, for the non-engineer robot person, “fit”.

Here’s a bit from is post on the Trossen Robotics Community:

These servos have a few really nice design features. 1) there are no cords coming out of it like normal servos. You can hook them up from one to another, daisy chain them together, keeping a really clean wired robot. Each servo is labeled with it’s ID and has an LED which can light up for you to check if you are controlling the correct servo from the software. 2) Servos can be continuous. With my PutterBot, I had to physically hack into the servo to make it continuous, so that it can be used as a drive gear for the tank tracks. Robotis servos can be used as regular servos, or can rotate forever, like a wheel. 3) servos are digital, very strong and can relay info back to the system, allowing you to capture rotational values to the pc by simply rotating the servos by hand. Simply put, instead of sliding sliders around in the software, or worse yet type in values, to get servos where you want them, you just pose the robot and the software knows what rotational value each servo has.

[Thanks Trossen!]