The sound of hundreds of pounds of metal slamming into each other, and the smell of burning rubber and fried electronics finally fades.
It’s been three weeks since the annual International RoboGames took place, and I think my hearing is finally back.

This year’s annual RoboGames was a huge success, and we’d like to thank everyone for coming down to the San Mateo Event Center and hope to see you again in October for The ComBots Cup!

For those not familiar, RoboGames is the world’s largest robotics competition! The 3-day extravaganza featured 239 teams from 17 countries competing in 59 separate events; including soccer, hockey, sumo, fire-fighting, kung-fu, and the ever popular (and dangerous) combat robots!

I’d like to send out a special thanks to the crazy Brazilian teams that showed up, as well as the Japanese teams that made the long trek out despite the obvious complications at home.

As an added bonus we were joined by Grant Imahara (of Mythbusters fame) and The Science Channel. They were filming a TV special that is set to air on Memorial Day Weekend, more news as we get it!

For those that want to check out what they missed (or relive what they saw), YouTube is overflowing with RoboGames videos:

Make sure to check out the combat, as well as humanoid events!

(Credit to Lem Fugitt and robots-dreams.com for the footage)

Lastly, a quick thank-you to our sponsors:

Google, Jameco, TechShop, The Robot MarketPlace, Neato Robotics, Willow Garage, Servo Magazine, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, Innovati, Robots-Dreams and FingerTech Robotics!

Check out more RoboGames coverage!
Jameco RoboGames Update
Wired RoboGames Coverage
IEEE – Humanoids at RoboGames
nerdsinbabeland.com

-The Intern

So mumble mumble behind in posting blah blah catch-up blarg overbooked blah excuses excuses blah blah Robot Round-Up yeehaw. Blah blah blah:

Robot Marathon blah blah Osaka prattle blab Vstone Japan blah Robovie blah blah Robot-Dreams blah blah ACTUAL INTERVIEW IN RUNNER’S WORLD (kinda) whoo robot athletes blah. [Pithy comment blah RoboGames blah blah]

Blah Cheetahbot blahblah vroom.

Blah Honda U3-X not as spylike as it sounds blah blah Honda Robotics sponsor us blah.

OMG BLAH WOOT PETER WELLER blah ROBOCOP STATUE ZOMGROXXORS VIDEO

Okay now that we are all caught up we over here, we will do our best to actually blog about something other than cocktail robots or RoboGames for a change. I promise.

[Thank you The BBC, Robots-Dreams, Vstone, Technabob, Runner's World, PopSci, Honda, and as always, LaughingSquid.]

The superlative Jeri Ellsworth brings us this touching take of how a contest featuring everyone’s favorite integrated circuit chip 555 Contest (currently running and sponsored, in part, by RoboGames, whee!) came to be.

I am sure all of our faithful readers (all six of you) out there will jump at the chance to win bragging rights and fabulous prizes by entering the contest! Go go go!

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!

This talk is as awesome as you might think it is. Cynthia is one of our heroines.

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!]

Yeah yeah we’re behind the power curve on this one, but here, video in the vein of the rapture-making Arthur Ganson, of a machine that ties a tie. Oh what a tie is tied.

Thanks as always to the kickass AdaFruit for the link.

Hey all you Mechwarriors kung fu fighters and RoboOne aspirants, here’s a nice hack that will definitely make you the belle of the competition in April

Although if Taylor Veltrop, humanoid roboticist and Kinect hacker extraordinaire, shows up to RoboGames, you guys are going to have some scrambling to do:

The robot is based on the ever-popular KHR-1 humanoid platform, and tweaked with ROS and the electronics have been replaced with a RoBoard.

[PSSST- Register for RoboGames HERE!]

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.

The BBC has a small piece on Polar Bears whaling on remote-controlled robotic cameras designed to unobtrusively chart the bears in their natural habitat in Svalbard, Norway. This splendid piece of observation and film-making yielded some really gorgeous footage of polar bears being polar bears*, which includes some spectacular ingenuity in the field of tearing the living hell out of the electronics.

The cameras used for a documentary on polar bears were designed to be as unobtrusive and resilient as possible.

Polar Bear: Spy on The Ice used hi-tech “spy cams” to get as close as possible to the bears during summer in the Arctic islands of Svalbard.

But while they were built to withstand temperatures as low as -40C, in the end most could not cope with the curiosity displayed by their subjects.

The producer must have wept, then wet him/herself at the prospect of what was in the camera afterwards.

Thanks Paul Saffo!

*OMG SO FLUUUFFYYYY!!

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!

The Australian contingent of the Robot Fighting League recently had an event Down Under, and forwarded us videos to prove it.

In their words: “All our fights were broadcast live on the internet, but we forgot to let you guys know. Sorry.”

They will be dealt with summarily. Before that, here are some nice boomysmashy videos to get your mid-whatever-season-it-is-in-your-hemisphere blues all fired up and filled with robotty goodness:

See also an MP4 here with BOTCAM! Action (takes a bit to load) and another one here (also takes a bit to load that features BOTCAM! Action from an opposing angle.

In the first video there is what he Aussie call a LiPoly Fire. I would just like to say (omgomgomg I actually get to say this omg whee):

THAT’S not a LiPoly fire.

THIS is a Lipoly Fire!:

The action begins about 40 seconds in.

Thanks Aussie RFL participant Kkeerroo and Matt Maxham of Team Plumb Crazy for the ComBots Cup V video

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.

Go Stanford.

Thanks Singularity Hub!

Ladies and Gentlemen, the HAMDAS-R:

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: