. . .for maker faire.

It all started Tuesday. Tuesday was the day ahead of the day we were officially to start loading in, but the Expo Center was nice enough to offer it to us a day early. So, spirits high, we called Larry, our Esteemed Trailer Hauler, and said “Make Mine a Combat Arena, Jeeves!”. Larry shows up that evening, raring to go, keys to the gate provided by Mr. Snook of Nimby LLC, where our trailer, Snuggy*, is parked.

Larry calls at 11pm and says we have a flat tire. Right. Okay.

Thus beginneth the Maker Fair Combots Cup Saga.

(more…)

What’s better than robot/monster art, helping charity, and puzzles? How about if you get to keep the art?

One of Suicidebot’s favorite artists, Joe Alterio, is offering to draw YOU a robot or a monster for just $25! And all proceeds go to benefit AIDS research.

“I’m proud to announce the creation of my new project, RobotsAndMonsters.org .. in an effort to raise money for the SF AIDS Foundation, and the Pangea Foundation, dedicated to prevention as well as helping those with HIV/AIDS, in the SF Bay Area and the developing world, respectively. It’s a great cause that hits closer to home than many of you may know: in such a powerful and wealthy country, we shouldn’t be letting people die from any pandemic, let alone be shamed into covering up their affliction.

Robots And Monsters, a charitable effort that is one part fund raiser, one part low brow art gallery, and one part collective art experiment. The concept is simple, but unique, I think: for a small sum, I’ll draw either a robot or monster, as defined by three words or phrases you provide. The benefits are plain: the money is raised for a great cause, I get some good forced drawing time in, and you get a great piece of art in the mail, perfect for you, or as a present for a friend, or for your kids, or whomever.

What’s more, any illustrators or drawers on here that feel like spending a few hours drawing some rad robots or monsters, be sure to contact me, I’d love to have you on-board.”

Oh this is super good my friends, it seems that our agents in the field have reported back with the Inductees of the 2007 Robot Hall of Fame (put on by all our clever friends at CarNAYgie Mellon). The winners were announced at the RoboBusiness conference and a good time is still being had by all.

–Update–

In the SciFi category, only one robot made it in this year:

Data from Star Trek: Next Gen

He joins C-3PO, R2-D2, Maria, and Gort, among others. Trekkies can rejoice. No longer is the hall of fame filled up with Star Wars bots. Data finally got in… I kinda expected him to end up as the Susan Lucci of robots.

The real question is, will the borg queen make it in next year?

3 robots from the “real world” made it in:

Lego Mindstorms

Where would the world of robot builders be without Legos? Almost every professional robot builder I know does prototyping in Lego Mindstorms. It’s the one kit that I recommend everyone should buy. It teaches you the basics of mechanical engineering, sensors, and how to program. You can make everything from a line follower to a copy machine (darn you, Tony Fudd.)

At RoboGames this June, there will be 10 different Mindstorms competitions, not to mention the combat robots, androids, and soccer players.

NAVLAB 5

NAVLAB 5 was the first attempt at a self-driving car. It could follow the lanes, turn, and do other simple maneuvers. If you think that Stanley is cool, remember that NAVLAB was done back in the dark ages of 1995.

12 years ago, it drove coast to coast all by itself. Beat that, Junior.

The Raibert Hopper was the fourth inductee. Almost all walking robots can trace their lineage back to the Hopper. You think it’s hard making a two legged robot walk? Try a one legged robot. Not only could it hop around the room, it was dynamically stable, and it could do backflips.

I bet you can’t do that.

Suicidebots.com does award you the dubious honor of

COOL ROBOT OF THE WEEK

Everybody party.

Update to the Update: CNET has pretty things to say about this as well.

It’s really hard to find an adult around here.

[Thanks Mike Strange! Additional Commentary over at The Blog Of The Long Now]

Dang decepticons anyways.

From Jalopnik, a site to make Your Own Transformer!

[Via Techyum!]

So we’re sure you’re wondering to yourself “Self? I have a hankering to enter *something* into that RoboGames thingydoo, but I Just. Don’t Know. What!”

Say you want a nice simple humanoid in which to compete in Kung Fu or the Agility or all those other exciting humanoid competitions.

You poke around for a bit and discover the ugly truth about building one from scratch:

“Oh Noo! Humanoids, they are so very complex!
They are hard to build and break if you look at them funny! I do not own a mill nor do I have a big giant brain with which I may re-invent the Humanoid Wheel! Whatever shall I do?”

Well, fear no more Faithful Reader. We have an outlet for all your robot-building needs. Trossen Robotics has just consented to partner with us for RoboGames 2007!

We love Trossen for their huge assortment of robots, kits and everything else, plus they have a spiffy blog from which we steal from which we gain inspiration!

There’s a kit here for every taste, from the hyperreal anime cosplay goodness of the Manoi series, to Robonova and everything above, below, betwixt and between. We all know you’ve secretly been wanting an AT-ST for your very own, now you can have one all for a reasonable price and a few hours dealing with tiny, tiny screws.

Trossen is going to have all kinds of good schwag at Robogames, like sticker and fliers, along with some really spiffy deals for RoboGames attendees!

Make sure you stick the stickers somewhere really inappropriate, like your mom, or the girl’s bathroom at the Uptown, because nothing says Awesome like random robot schwag in unexpected places.

Thank you for providing us with this opportunity, Trossen Robotics, We thank you.

As we mentioned a few posts back, the Rotor is spinning away on the SWARM project, a fleet of autonomous spherical robots. Keep track of what they’re up to on the SWARM blog — they are starting to roll!

Here’s what the spherical shell looks like. Nice, huh? Don’t miss the videos on the blog.

Over here at SB, we love power tools almost as much as we love fembots, so we were pretty stoked to find a blog dedicated to exactly that. Um, tools that is. Presenting Toolmonger, where besides the usual rundown of nailguns and suchlike, they often feature things the Rotor didn’t even know he wanted (like the Car Rotisserie), and they are certainly not above a little tank donut action now and then.

Check out this cordless electric lawn mower: is that not just begging to be hotrodded into a combot?

This super technical and highly in-depth piece brought to you by Achewood, because SB is snowed under with writing super technical and highly in-depth pieces for this website.

No really, this time for sure.

Sent in by James Welcher:

Whole Episodes of Top Gear from the BBC!

This one is about smooshing radio controlled cars into things. There are other episodes about equally important and exciting stuff!

BBC know that Youtube is their biggest advertiser. . .

Update Above To The Update Below: Violet Blue has more thoughts on her website, which links to more thoughts on other people’s websites, whoo hoo ripple effect (BTW: Some of Violet’s Site is NSFW).

The Industrious Violet Blue has a Very Good column in SFGate this morning about stupidness in the blogging world:

Imagine being a girl and working really hard to earn the reputation of a respected voice in the world of tech journalism and blogging — a world populated by disproportionately more men than women — and to find yourself the target object of a hate-filled Web site. The tone and content of the hate site centers around sexually threatening you, suggesting ways you could be killed and have your corpse defiled, stating that you are a “slut” and that your gender is also in question. Your straight male colleagues don’t have this problem.

Then the person running the hate site blogs about every word you say, every time you make a post or publish an article. And targets your friends. And posts the names of your family and Google satellite maps of your family’s homes. They deface your Wikipedia page at every opportunity, with sexual slurs, objectifying you at every possible chance. It’s enough to make a girl choose not to be a tech journalist.

Speaking as a chick who builds robots, the shock and incredulity that we can do such a thing is latent, rampant and annoying. When it’s downright threatening, you (yes, YOU) should be outraged.

UPDATE: SFGate is exploring this more. Pipe up on the Culture Blog.

It has come to our attention that the fine folks at Shifz and Monochrom, the people with the courage to discuss the role of cocktail robotics as an index for the integration of technological innovations into the human Lebenswelt, have set up a drive to get an contigent over to Robogames in June to compete in the cocktail robot competition.

Please give generously to their efforts so that we may crush them.

. . it probably listens to this show. . .

KROB”s blog looks appalling in Firefox but the links are perfectly serviceable.

Because, like Robot Haiku, there just never seems to be enough.

Robot Comix is a blog by a very prolific young man who draws, uh, comix, featuring, um, robots.

Call the numbah, get in the comic.

So simple and all for the price of one phone call!

Ain’t technology amazin’?

[Thank you once more, Stuart "Not A Robot" Bird. . .]

Because the word has been left without for far, far too long.

From Euphonious Feminine Cybernetics:

I like to remark
in seventeen* syllables
on robots’ impact.

Euphonious Feminine Cybernetics is a doll of a blog, made of carefully crafted haiku entries written to complement really interesting robotically-oriented links.

Not only is this a excellently written woman-driven blog, but Fembot DOES IT WITH A BRAIN TUMOR.

How freakin’ cool is that?

Thank you, thank you, Fembot!

[And thank YOU, Stuart "Not A Robot" Bird, for making me look closer!]

*or fewer