Dude, You don’t know. You just could not possibly know.



[Mad props to Left Handed Toons by Right Handed People and The Daily What]

Sex bots, legos, star wars and H4wt robot guy, SB pal@grantImahara! Whee!

Have you always wanted to be part of the world domination “in” crowd? Do you get your celebrity gossip from Popular Mechanics? Does five gallons of motor oil, three car batteries and a set of alligator clips turn you on?

Boy do we have a party for you. Join ComBots, Laughing Squid and the Robotics Society of America for a night out to benefit this year International RoboGames. Guzzle tasty beverages made by your favorite robot bartenders, see works in progress and other junk made out of art, and hobnob with some of the leading lights of robotic society.

Get a martini from a robot!
Buy great robot art!
Drive a combat robot!
Get a robot-made roasted mashmallow (made w/a flame thrower!)

image courtesy Scott Beale.

Door charge is a sliding scale, all proceeds go to making RoboGames 2009 better than ever! Give til it hurts. We do.

Follow http://twitter.com/robogames for the latest updates.

Saturday, May 9, 2009, 7:00pm-2am
Secret Location

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),

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.

The results are in at RoboExotica, the votes have been tallied, and the lovely cocktail making robots in Vienna have garnished their accolades. Eddie Codel has a good write-up of the event at LaughingSquid.

“To Serve Man” indeed…

Category – SERVING
winners: Sloth (kal spelletich)

And
fairy juicer (mitch heinrich, david fine)

Category – MIXING (more…)

As a follow up to the Hexapod-Meisterschaft post (sent to us courtesy Laughing Squid) we bring you little bit of explanation, and a little bit of Massïve Hëxäpöd Meistermäschinen!

These six-legged carryings-on are the result of the Fachhochschuler Oberösterreich, which as near as I can figure out is a network of technical high schools in Austria (any Austrians reading this please to shed light on this?). They have a lovely hexapod competition, and from the funk these machines bring, they do teach them a thing or two at FH Oberösterreich.

You can get your own hexapod kit to play around with at the wonderous Trossen Robotics, which I personally think is really great idea because baby robots need new pairs of shoes over here, if you get my meaning (yes, we are proud participants in the Trossen affiliate program).

Speaking of Austria, we are shipping the Rotor off to Vienna this Saturday for RoboExotica; his crate is almost done and we promised to put enough water and padding in there this time, so expect to hear from him and what those crazy Austrian cocktail roboticists are up to.

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.

. . .From the adorable Grant Imahara:

Yeah, do like Grant did and get yerself one-a them sexy stickers over in the sidebar there. Then you can say you were one of the cool kids way back when.

[Thanks Grant!]

Katyusha Kalashnikova the Foul-Mouthed Midget sends us this neat little software bot that locates closed-captioned movies in whatever zip code you happen to be in.

Fomdi is a happy little search bot that enables the deaf and hard of hearing to find a movie they can actually enjoy in a theater. You’d be surprised how annoying this is to do ordinarily.

In addition, today YouTube unveiled a new captioning service for its videos, which is very forward thinking and not-evil of them to do. YouTube joins the ranks of other like-minded companies like the BBC, CNet, UC Berkeley, MIT and Gonzodoga that have realized that you you can just do the darndest things with all this new technology, and make friends and influence people besides.

For those who were interested in the lyrics to the previous German song “Kaputt”. Full lyrics after the jump
(more…)

Ah, the joy that robots bring into your life.

Four years ago today (August 1st), I married the best girl in the world. She’s the best present that I have ever got, but the best present that we got that day, was our ring-bearer – Mechadon, courtesy of Mark Setrakian and Peter Abrahamson.

To keep this topical:


(When I grow up, I wanna be Mark Setrakian and make robots like he does – ones that you’d think would be CGI but are real… Mind you, that would mean that someone would have to cure my ADHD first… )

Anyway, apparently, our happy day was a news-worthy event. Although there are lots of pix from that great day…

Simone is still a stinky girl, but she’s OK for someone with cooties.

Hold on while I go punch her in the arm and run away.

Because who does not love light, aerodynamic aerial cuisinarts with minds of their own?

These hellys are already doing tasks in Asia and elsewhere, collaboratively, and with a minimum of breakage and crashing. Collaborative robots are what is going to make Skynet wake up one day, so everybody get on their good side now.

You can even buy one of your very own here from Rotomotion.

[via Dvice and The Lab For Autonomous Flying Robots. Thanks Swarmies!]

Everyone present cried and took lots of pictures:

Yes, that is a diagram of a wee small orb’s first shaky foray into autonomous movement. We are beyond proud over here in the RoBunker, because hell that must have been approximately a ton and a half of hell to make it all go. From Michael Prados, One Of The Lead Swarmies and Possessor of The Will To Orb:

Jon, Niladri, and I coded all day, and then went to the soccer field to sit in the dark and code and debug some more. The culmination of this massive brain exertion is the stumbling attempt at a straight line in the linked jpg [above]. It may not look like much, but for the first time, all the major pieces of orb navigation are working together to autonomously guide the orb along a specified path. We are giving it a way point 20m in front of its initial position, and asking it to go there.

Le Roteur Superieur commemorates this historic moment with un petit pastiche de Seuss:

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!

You have brains in your Orbs.
You have code in your SPU
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the SWARM who’ll decide where to roll.

You’ll look up and down streets. Look ‘em over with care.
About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.”
With your nice IMU and your SPU full of code,
you’re too smart to go down any not-so-good road.

And you may not find any
you’ll want to go down.
In that case, of course,
you’ll head straight out of town.

It’s opener there
in the wide open air.

Out there things can happen
and frequently do
to Orbs who are brainy
and swarmy as you.

And when things start to happen,
don’t worry. Don’t stew.
Just roll right along.
You’ll start happening too.

OH!
THE PLACES YOU’LL ROLL!

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!