As announced in the recent RobotShop Press Release, the Mint, a floor wiping robot  by Evolution Robotics, is finally out in the wild and available at RobotShop along with all of its robotic floor cleaning friends.

After vacuum robots, now it is the turn for floor wiping (or Swiffer) robots to clean our houses. This smart rather diminutive robot silently and systematically wipes the entirety of the floors of the unsuspecting owner. It can even mop the floor if need be . It uses a navigation technology called NorthStar that allows it to track its position anywhere in a room with the help of a stationary beacon. See the video below for further details.

Via RobotShop Blog.

The iPhone controlled flying robot, AR-Drone, which was debuted at CES this year, now has a price tag. Parrot has announced that the autonomous quadracopter will retail for $300 USD and be available in September. While Gizmodo says, “ouch!”, we say “wow!” because I was fully expecting a >$500 price tag, considering that the vehicle has 2 cameras and Wifi connectivity, along with an ultrasonic altimeter and gyro-stabilization. You can read the details on Parrot’s page.

The AR-Drone appears to be a great platform for hacking, since Parrot has already said they will be releasing an API for interfacing to the vehicle, and the on-board processor is a 500 MHz ARM9 running Linux with 128 Mb of RAM. I can’t wait till September!

[Via RobotBox, via Gizmodo]

Dan Kara, president of Robotics Trends, just emailed me to let me and you readers know that there’s a free Robotics Virtual Summit going on tomorrow, June 16th, 2010 from 9AM – 6PM EST. It will feature presentations from MobileRobots, Inc.,  NASA Ames Research Center, 5D Robotics, Inc., National Instruments and others. Here’s a list of the conference sessions.

The idea of a “virtual” conference is a little goofy, but maybe it’ll be useful. Either way, it’s free to attend. So, kick back with a brew tomorrow and have some virtual conference fun.

Ok folks, I know it’s taken a while, but the results are finally in and we now have winners for the GoRobotics 10th anniversary giveaway! I’m super excited about this and very grateful to our prizes sponsors:
Pololu
Solarbotics ,
Vex Robotics,
Apress, and No Starch Press.

Before listing the winners let me say a few words on the judging. Each project had at least two judges (and some had three) who evaluated the robots based on three criteria: Originality/Creativity (25%), Workmanship (25%), and Builder Experience (50%). Finally, each robot got up to a +/- 50% adjustment based on the judges discretion. Basically we tried to judge based on cool robots and account for how much experience the builder had. In the end, I think it worked out pretty well. I’d also like to give a big thanks to all the entrants! It was a lot of fun judging all the neat creations. You folks do some nice work!

To accommodate some winners I changed around the prizes a bit from the original post. So, without more delay, the winners:

3rd Place - HaloBOT by mcb1 – chosen at random

Mark says, “I built HaloBOT for my daughter. It was her design, which was based on an earlier version that used overseas sourced parts. It is based on Picaxe18 and can be programmed in either basic or flowchart, which suits her programming level.”

HaloBOT wins:

Pololu Jrk 21v3 USB Motor Controller (donated by Pololu), Build Your Own CNC Machine (donated by Apress), LEGO Mindstorms NXT One-Kit Wonders (donatedby No Starch Press). ($105 total!)

2nd Place – Mosquito Rover by MarkusB

Markus says, “[The Mosquito Rover] Navigates around via IR, produces oxyhydrogen, shoots off rubber plugs. The idea behind the mosqito rover was to combine robotics and chemistry — in this case electrochemistry — and that the robot makes it’s own explosives by solar power and propels a second small flying object with it.”

He also says, “I will donate the Arduino Kit to a Chinese student who can not afford to buy it under the condition to build a robot and post this robot on LMR.” Awesome!

The Mosquito Rover wins:

Oomlout Arduino Experimenters Kit (donated by Solarbotics), Practical Arduino and LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0: The Kings Treasure (donated byApress), and The Unofficial LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Inventor’s Guide (donated by No Starch Press) ($165 total!)

1 st Place Prize – LadyBugBot by isotope

Vadim ‘isotope’ says, “Regarding how the idea of building LadyBugBot came to me… It did as all brilliant ideas come, when I was opening my fridge to get another beer, I saw a tiny ladybug magnet… At that very moment, my Muse dropped a construction brick on my head, and I told myself I’m going to build a robotic fridge magnet! And I did it! )))”

Vadim has been interested in electronics since an early age, but didn’t start building robots till well after college when he stumbled across the website letsmakerobots.com. Now it’s his hobby of choice.

LadyBugBog wins:

Penguin Robot Extreme NXT(donated by Apress), Wall Hugging Mouse Kit (donated by Zagros Robotics), LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Thinking Robots (donated by No Starch Press) ($268 total!)

Grand Prize Winner – Walkin’ Sticks by ButchAlline

ButchAlline says, “This is a very simple crawler robot using three servos and a Basic Stamp 2. It can do most of the moves of the 16 servo hexapods at one tenth the price. Next step is to add radio control and maybe a camera.”

Butch is a 71 year old, retired mechanical engineer. He says, “I have always had an interest in electronics, got a ham license 40 years ago, and have flown RC planes for the last 25 years.” He got into robotics after buying a Basic Stamp II and workbook. He built “Walkin’ Sticks” after being shocked at the price of commercial hexapod robots.

Walkin’ Sticks wins:

Vex Dual Controller Starter Bundle with RobotC (donated by Vex Robotics) ($500 USD!)

Congratulations to you all! Below is the list of the top 15 by score. The results were very close! You’ll notice that our grand prize winner, Walkin’ Sticks, was actually 3rd place by score, but due to import/export restrictions, the Grand Prize can only go to a US resident.

Top Winners:

Thanks to some great research at Waseda University, doctors of the Showa University of Dentistry now have robots to use as teaching aids. Meet Hanako.

The humanoid robots are designed to resemble a human female and are programmed to illicit responses similar to what a dental patient might, such as wincing in pain if the dentist is not careful about the procedure at hand.

The robots has a variety of emulations to give the dentist as realistic a simulation as possible. ‘She’ can blink, roll her eyes, move her jaw and her tongue too. A nice touch is that the robot also exhibits tiredness during a long procedure by slackening the artificial muscles of her jaw muscles, and yes – she even drools. You can catch a video here.

Waseda University is known for their work on KOBIAN, an emotional humanoid robot, which is delight to check out because it provides some context for the body of work coming out of Waseda. Check out Pink Tenatcle’s post about KOBIAN.

To look back in time a little, the concept of using robots in dentistry training isn’t a new idea, it’s one that’s been developed over a few years now. At the International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo in 2007, Kokoro Company Ltd (interestingly enough, a Sanrio Group company – they don’t just make Hello Kitty merchandise, they make robots too) unveiled the Simroid dental patient, which has been noted for its appearance falling deep into the uncanny valley much like its sister project the Actroid: robot receptionist. They share an abundance of features.

Like her Actroid sister, Simroid is equipped with a system of air-powered muscles and soft silicone skin. However, she has something the Actroid does not — sensitive teeth. Thanks to a mouth loaded with sensors, she knows when her dentist-in-training makes a mistake. And to express her pain, she grimaces, moves her hands and eyes, and says, “That hurts.” - via Pink Tentacle back in 2006.

Another unique is that she exhibits a gag reflex if instruments are too far back in her mouth. You watch a video of Simroid here.

I like this progression of robotics for dientistry that I am seeing because it means that robots are making a place for themselves in educational contexts. That’s great! PhysOrg sums up thesituation quite nicely:

Few people would want to be guinea pigs for aspiring dentists but Japan has found an always-willing patient — a robot. – via PhysOrg

In other news, I still have an interview and Hexbug Nano review coming – hopefully early in the week next week. In the meantime, if you see some amazing robot news, be the first to share it with us and help spread the robot appreciation.

Hi everyone, it’s been a while since I posted – had my birthday last week, so it made things a little bit crazy for me. You can all congratulate me on turning twenty-two for the fourth time. Feels good, turning twenty-two again.

I may have mentioned some time ago that I’m working on an interview with Angelica Lim of (take a deep breath) Okuno & Ogata Laboratory Speech Media Processing Group at the Department of Intelligence Science and Technology of the Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University. That’s an extremely detailed description of a department! You can visit their website here.

Next week, I’ll be bringing you more details on all the robots in Angelica’s lab, as well as a breifing on thier published papers as well as how their recent conference presentations went over. It’ll be exciting, so watch for it.

In the meantime, Angelica has a great video of a robot she works with playing a theremin alongside her flute-playing to ‘Angels We Have Heard on High’ – check it out right here, you won’t be disappointed.

Happy hacking, and more soon!

It’s that time again! Time for the March celebration of GoRobotics’ 10th Birthday. We’re once again giving away fabulous robot prizes to 3 lucky winners. Previous contests have been great, and we’re excited to be doing it again with prizes from our sponsors Pololu, Super Droid Robots, Zagros Robotics, Solarbotics and No Starch Press.

There are four ways of entering this month’s contest:

1. Simply comment on this post and tell us your favorite robot websites.
2. Follow GoRobotics on Twitter and leave a comment below telling us your Twitter username.
3. Follow RobotBox on Twitter and leave a comment below telling us your Twitter username.
4. Retweet the following, “Enter @GoRobotics.net’s 10 Year Birthday Robot Giveaway http://wp.me/pgDpL-kM“. Leave a comment when you do.

YOU CAN DO ALL FOUR (four comments) TO INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING!

Winners will be chosen at random. Three winners will be chosen and the first winners will get his/her choice of the prizes, second place gets second choice and third place gets whatever is left over! The contest ends MARCH 31st, 2010 at 12AM EST. Comments are moderated to prevent spam. Your comment won’t show up till the moderator has approved it. Here are this month’s prizes:

1st Place Prize – Orangutan B-328 Robot Controller (donated by Pololu), 2x 24V 195 RPM Gear Motors (donated by Super Droid Robots), and The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Idea Book (donated by No Starch Press) – worth $100

The Baby Orangutan B-328 robot controller from Pololu is the perfect choice for a brain for your robot. Its 24 pin compact form allows it to fit into very small robots without sacrificing its powerful AVR microcontroller and 2 channel motor drivers. Yep, that’s right – this little guy is both a controller and a motor driver! All you need to add is sensors and some motors. It has an ATMega328P processor, an onboard potentiometer and LED, and 32 KB flash, 2 KB RAM, and 1 KB EEPROM. The motor driver can handle up to 1A continuos per channel, 3A peak.

These powerful 24V motors donated by Super Droid Robots will kick-start your next robot project. They are high-quality motors with steel gears (not cheap plastic), and used in Super Droid’s All-terrain robots. They use a 1:27 gear reduction and have an amazing 12 kgf-cm of torque. That means they could lift a 26 lb (12 kg) load using a 1 cm lever arm! They are rated for < 250 mA of drive current. Note: These motors are probably  bit too big to be driven directly from the Baby Orangutan B-328P. Try the Dual MC33926 Motor Driver Carrier

The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Idea Book features chapters on programming and design, CAD-style drawings, and abundance of screenshots make it easy for the reader to master the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT kit and to build and program nine example robots. Chapters cover using the NXT programming language (NXT-G) as well as troubleshooting; design; software; sensors; Bluetooth; even how to create a NXT remote control.

2nd Place Prize – Arduino Duemilanove, Tamiya Gear Box and Sport Tires (donated by Zagros Robotics), and The Unofficial LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Inventor’s Guide (donated by No Starch Press) - worth $75

The Arduino Duemilanove is a powerful and simple robot controller built around the AtMega328P microcontroller. It comes with a bootloader already on the device so you can easily write and download programs using only a USB cable. It has many digital and analog IO lines to make connecting it to your project easy.

The Tamiya double gearbox is perfect for use in amateur robot contests, this gearbox is suitable for use with remote controlled robots. Choice of 4 gear ratios, offers emphasis on speed or power to suit your needs. Left/right independent design means you can set different gear ratios for either side. Coupled with the Sport Tire set, you’ll have a great robot propulsion system to hook up to your Duemilanove.

The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT set is a very powerful robotics toolkit, but it lacks a detailed user’s guide. This is the user’s guide that every MINDSTORMS owner needs. The Unofficial LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Inventor’s Guide begins by introducing the NXT set and directing the reader through setup. Following this is an in-depth discussion of the set’s electronic elements and other LEGO pieces as well as building techniques. Next, it covers the NXT-G programming environment and introduces several unofficial programming languages, providing examples of code and programming insights along the way. Finally, it presents a method for designing NXT robots in addition to a series of projects with building and programming instructions for creating complete robots.

3rd Place Prize – Herbie the Mousebot Kit (donated by Solarbotics), and LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Thinking Robots (donated by No Starch Press) – worth $75

The Herbie the Mousebot Kit from Solarbotics is a great way to introduce ourself or a child to robotics. The kit is a 9-volt battery-powered light-following robot that loves to chase flash light beams. These little robots are so quick, you have to run to keep up to them! We’ve even enhanced Herbiewith functional whisker and tail sensors, so he doesn’t get stuck in corners or under obstacles while chasing around. It doesn’t require a microcontroller or any programming and the kit comes with all the parts and documentation to get started.

LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Thinking Robots includes full building and programming instructions for two of Daniele Benedettelli’s most unique creations—a brand new version of his famous Rubik’s Cube solver and an interactive Tic-Tac-Toe playing robot.

Rules/Regulations/Fine Print:

• To enter the contest, you must comment on this post.
• Giveaway ends March 31st, at 12AM EST (9PM PST)
• One prize package per winner.
• No purchase is necessary to enter the contest – it’s free!
• Everyone is eligible, but shipping is free to only those in the Continental US – if you are outside this area, you will have to pay for shipping.
• PayPal is required to pay for shipping if you live out of the Continental US
• Winners will be contacted via email supplied in the comment form.
• You have 48 hrs to respond to the email and choose your prize package.
• GoRobotics.net makes NO WARRANTY or GUARANTEES about these prizes.
• GoRobotics.net can change the rules WHENEVER IT WANTS.

Special Thanks to Our Sponsors! BUY STUFF FROM THEM:

SPONSORED BY:

I think I’ve been rather fortunate that I’ve been able to meet a lot of interesting women in robotics, it’s kind of interesting that in the area of robotics more than other areas of computing I’ve dabbled in I actually found more women than the others. Now, this is entirely an anecdote based solely on my own experience. The article I found for today is what I’d call pretty darn awesome, because it means that we’re encouraging a whole lot more people to join the field. That’s roughly half our population that needs to see how fun robotics can be who will hopefully make new and exciting contributions.

FIRST is a high-school level robotics competition that Kat Struckman decided to try and inspire young women towards and in doing so she guided Team 1073 from Hollis/Brookline High School compete in the FIRST regionals. Two seniors from the highschool took it upon themselves to write up a plan to have more young women join the FIRST team in a Chariman’s Award letter. The plan details plans over three years to encourage more young women into robotics and hopefully related fields of science, engineering, technology, and math.

Kabel and Struckman came up with the idea of US FIRST Girls, which is a program dedicated to recruiting girls to join the FIRST Robotics program. Their plan included the design of a Web site and program to contact as many FIRST Robotics teams as possible.   In its third year, the Web site has had more than 125 teams join, including a team in Israel As a result of this effort, members of SWE, the Society of Women Engineers, are being recruited as mentors for current and future teams. – via The Nashua Telegraph

The movement is taking off enough that the organizers and enlisting mentors via the Society of Women Engineers. If you know high schoolers that you think would be interested, check out the US and Canadian FIRST websites for more information.

The M3-Neony and M3-Synchy were developed as baby bots aimed at testing machine learning software, and specifically to take a look at fine motor skill development. The hardware on this adorable little bot are some typical cameras, a microphone, gyro, accelerometer, and tactile sensors.

I heard about the M3–neony and M3-synchy through this Engadget article but I was disappointed the coverage was so scant. When I began blogging for GoRobotics, I mentioned briefly my loved for HCI, and in particular human-robot interaction – naturally, this article inspired me enough for a second article today. But, as I was excited reading about it, it looks like the article only mentions briefly the research goals of the bots. There is, however, a lot of information about what was used to make them for you gearheads out there. I’m going to comb to find the Japanese lab site if I can, in the meantime here is what’s available so far:

This article at Plastic Pals seems to have more detailed specs on these two robots. The article is long, but features more detailed specs on the bot:

[...] it is 50cm (19.6″) tall, weighs about 3.5kg (7.7 lbs) – about the size of a newborn.  A pair of CMOS cameras for sight and microphones for hearing, as well as gyro and accelerometer sensors, and tactile sensors provide various feedback. The robot has a total of 22 degrees of freedom, powered by high torque (41kg/cm) servo motors sold by Osaka-based robotics company Vstone.

The main focus is on facial expressions and arm gestures, so it is an upper body robot only, with 17 DOF (2 eyes x3, neck x3, waist x2, 2 arms x3), measuring 30cm (12″) tall and weighing 2.5kg (5.5 lbs). The head is equipped with a single wide-angle lens CCD camera, two microphones, a speaker, and 15 LEDs which cause the robot to blush bright red.  Combined with object recognition, speech recognition, and speech synthesis, the robot will be able to communicate in a variety of ways.  The chest and arms appear to be based on Vstone’s Robovie-X hobby robot kit.

If anyone finds out more about what kind of tactile sensors are involved, I’d love to hear about it. Tactile sensors aren’t something I hear about a lot and I’d love to put together an article on what’s out there.

You can catch a video here, and do check out the Plastic Pals article – they have a great gallery of these baby bots.

This little gem came to me courtesy of my friend Greg Baker, who is a lecturer in Computer Science at Simon Fraser University. Thanks Greg! This one was too cool to pass up.

Gåågle - It’s not as weird to pronounce as you’d think. It’s actually pronounced like Google and you’ll begin to see why soon enough. Gåågle Bot is a modified remote-control Roomba that bears a webcam, fueled by real-time AJAX calls that zips around taking pictures and indexing the real world as it sees it. Vacuum, index. I love efficiency!

!

The name GåågleBot is a play on the words gÃ¥ and google bot. The Swedish word for go is gåå. Googlebot, is the name of Google’s web indexer. If you don’t know what Google is, you are either lying or out of luck. Hence GåågleBot is a “going” indexer, indexing the real world around us while vacuuming your home at the same time! Can’t find that library book that is due tomorrow? Relax, just Gåågle it!

Excited about this bot? Head over here and give it a try. There is also a pretty nifty video as well showing the bot in action. The main site has all of the components listed, the source code, and other tidbits to get you started building your own remote-control crawler.

Today I have an interesting tidbit for those of you on LinkedIn ! There is now a LinkedIn group for hobby roboteers! Now I have even more of a reason to finally get on LinkedIn – we’ll see how much the temptation drives me.

The meat of today’s article is MIT’s MeBot.

MIT's MeBot

MIT has a pretty established humanoid robotics lab, meaning they’re at the forefront of our latent dreams to one day have cyborgs and robots walk the streets with our fellow man. (Call it whimsy, call it crazy, but I’m looking forward to an increasing number of robots in society. ) Anybody interested in robotics already knows of the legacy that MIT has for it’s robotics development, including Kismet – a rather impressive early attempt at robot-human social interaction (you can find more about Kismet here), and Cog – another human-robot interaction experiment that followed the reasoning that Cog should be able to learn from interacting with humans (more information about Cog here). MeBot comes to us from the Personal Robotics Lab.

Telerobotics is the area of robotics development concerned with – you probably guessed it – remote-control robots. The overarching idea of the field is that work needs to be done at a distance in some situations in life, and telerobotics is here to aim to answer those challenges.

The robot was presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference in Osaka, Japan. Putting an OQO atop for a head plus some gesturing arms into the mix, it adds depth to the notion that you could really be there, and with a decent range of motion, rolling down the halls of MIT. Remotely. Via a robot.

The proposal here is that this mode allows the user to be more engaged through the movement of the head and arms. The head tracks  the face of of the user so that it can ‘look around’. The arms are moved by a set of hand-operated controls.

The “Gulper AUV” is an underwater vehicle that is programmed to look for information of use to the scientific community.

Gulper AUV Sub-Aquatic Robot

The group explains that it has ‘trained’ the robot to retrieve the highest-quality information back to them.

“We tell it, ‘here’s the range of tasks that we want you to perform’, and it goes off and assesses what is happening in the ocean, making decisions about how much of the range it will cover to get back the data we want.” says Dr Maughan of MBARI.

The Gulper AUV is used to help scientists keep tabs on various algae. In particular, these scientists are keeping watch for algae blooms that could means problems for the ecosystem.

It used to be the case that a ship would be sent out for a whole day every few weeks to retrieve the kind of information that the Gulper AUV can nab in one of its trips. They just take it out to the harbor, and away it goes on its mission. Around twenty-four hours later, it comes back, they hoist it away, and analyze the results.

The biggest flag to go off in my mind is that this must require some interesting exploration and path planning algorithms to deal with an undersea environment. Taking a look at MBARI’s website, the Gulper AUV is equipped with four sonar that operate simultaneously to provide a fantastic map of the sea floor in high resolution.

The multibeam sonar produces high-resolution bathymetry (analogous to topography on land), the sidescan sonars produce imagery based on the intensity of the sound energy’s reflections, and the subbottom profiler penetrates sediments on the seafloor, allowing the detection of layers within the sediments, faults, and depth to the basement rock. All components are rated to 6000 m depth. The vehicle is launched on programmed missions and runs on its own battery power until it returns to the ship, as programmed, for recovery – MBARI AUV Mapping Page

Head over to the article at BBC to hear an audio snippet about the Gulper AUV. it’s about halfway down the page. If you think that’s cool, then you’d also better head over to the AUV’s home page at MBARI to check out the technical goods.

It’s time once again to give away some cool robot prizes to celebrate the 10th birthday of GoRobotics! If you didn’t win last month’s contest, have no fear, try again this month (and the month after!). We have some great robot prizes from our sponsors, SuperDroid Robots, Apress, and Pololu.

There are three ways of entering this month’s contest:

1. Simply comment on this post and tell us why you should win.
2. Follow GoRobotics on Twitter and leave a comment below telling us your Twitter username.
3. Retweet the following, “Enter @GoRobotics.net’s 10 Year Birthday Robot Giveaway http://wp.me/pgDpL-kM“. Leave a comment when you do.

YOU CAN DO ALL THREE (three comments) TO INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING!

Winners will be chosen at random. Three winners will be chosen and the first winners will get his/her choice of the prizes, second place gets second choice and third place gets whatever is left over! The contest ends FEBRUARY 28th, 2010 at 12AM EST. Comments are moderated to prevent spam. Your comment won’t show up till the moderator has approved it. Here are this month’s prizes:

1st Place Prize – Parallax Penguin Robot worth $200 USD.

The Penguin Robot by Parallax is a unique walking robot. Using two micro servos and precisely CNC machined parts, the robot can walk via a “tilt-stride action” gait. The cute little penguin comes equipped with a digital compass to track its heading, two photoresistors for sensing ambient light and light tracking, and two infrared emitters and a detector for obstacle avoidance. The Penguin Robot comes with a 7-segment LED indicator and a piezo buzzer for making sound. This is a great kit for getting into robotics, and you should set aside about 4 hours to assemble him.

2nd Place Prize – Build Your Own CNC Machine, Extreme NXT, and LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0: The Kings Treasure (donated by Apress) worth $75 USD

The second place prize is a whole raft of excellent books from Apress.

Build Your Own CNC Machine is the book to get you started in fabricating your own parts. CNC expert Patrick Hood-Daniel and best-selling author James Kelly team up to show you how to construct your very own CNC machine for about $500 – $1000 USD. Then they go on to show you how to use it, how to document your designs in Computer-Aided Design programs, and how to output your designs as specifications and tool paths that feed into the CNC machine, controlling it as it builds whatever parts your imagination can dream up.

Extreme NXT shows you how to advance the NXT with more than 45 exciting projects that include creating a cool magic wand that writes words in thin air, building a remotely guided vehicle, and constructing sophisticated robots that can sense color, light, temperature, and more. All projects are explained with easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions, so you’ll be able to create them successfully whether you’re a novice or an expert. This book also shows you how to expand the programming software and use the alternative language NXC.

LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0: The King’s Treasure is written for children ages 10 and up who want to learn to design, build, and operate robots using LEGO’s immensely popular MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 robotics kit. The book leads readers through a series of five projects centered on an engaging story line. It can be read by kids alone, or it can provide the spark for a wonderful series of parent/child activities.

3rd Place Prize – 2x 24V 195 RPM Gear Motors (donated by Super Droid Robots) worth $40 USD

These powerful 24V motors donated by Super Droid Robots will kick-start your next robot project. They are high-quality motors with steel gears (not cheap plastic), and used in Super Droid’s All-terrain robots. They use a 1:27 gear reduction and have an amazing 12 kgf-cm of torque. That means they could lift a 26 lb (12 kg) load using a 1 cm lever arm! They are rated for < 250 mA of drive current. Get started building something cool!

Update: Congratulations to our winners, Gerry Blondeaux, Dalton Caughell, and Matt Thouvenot.

Rules/Regulations/Fine Print:

• To enter the contest, you must comment on this post.
• Giveaway ends February 28th, at 12AM EST (9PM PST)
• One prize package per winner.
• No purchase is necessary to enter the contest it’s free!>
• Everyone is eligible, but shipping is free to only those in the Continental US: if you are outside this area, you will have to pay for shipping.
• PayPal is required to pay for shipping if you live out of the Continental US
• Winners will be contacted via email supplied in the comment form.
• You have 48 hrs to respond to the email and choose your prize package.
• GoRobotics.net makes NO WARRANTY or GUARANTEES about these prizes.
• GoRobotics.net can change the rules WHENEVER IT WANTS.

Special Thanks to Our Sponsors! BUY STUFF FROM THEM:

Hi everyone, I’m Angelina and I’ve just jumped on board with GoRobotics as of late. I’m particularly inclined towards social cases and human-robot interaction, so I hope to bring you a lot of interesting stories on that front. I have a background in artificial intelligence (cognitive science) and so another thing I hope to do is to bring some of the interesting scientific developments into the public eye. Academic papers can be overwhelming even if you know the jargon necessary, so I hope to act as a translator and give you some tidbits of what’s going on in university robotics research.

In what has been an ongoing controversial move in the United Kingdom, police forces all over the nation will be able to draw on unmanned air drone robots for surveillance support. The units are remote-controlled and equipped with thermal imaging units, and they’ll set you back about $30,500. So far there is only one unit seeing action in the UK, and it’s already getting publicity for helping the police do their job.

The Merseyside police who happened to be lucky enough to have one of these $30,500 drones flicked on the thermal imaging on a tip that a suspected car thief was somewhere in the neighborhood. They managed to pinpoint the suspect from about three hundred meters away, and their actions also eventually led to the arrest of a second suspect shortly thereafter. Sky News has the coverage over here.

A young man was caught and arrested for breaking a law, which makes this a good day for robotics, and a good case for robots in a pragmatic, practical role. Still, speculation considers the increased use of robots within the police and military to be walking a rather fine line for safety, especially if future units are armed and are expected to operate with any sense of autonomy. Wired has an interesting article detailing the possible ways that police drones could be armed in the future.

It’s time to kick start our 10 Years of GoRobotics celebration! Our first giveaway features some great prizes from our sponsors, SuperDroid Robots, Apress, and Pololu. Entering this month’s contest will be simple. Here’s what you need to do: simply comment on this post and tell us your favorite robot. Winners will be chosen at random. Three winners will be chosen and the first winners will get his/her choice of the prizes, second place gets second choice and third place gets whatever is left over! The contest ends JANUARY 31st, 2010 at 12AM EST. Comments are moderated to prevent spam. Your comment won’t show up till the moderator has approved it.

Here are this month’s prizes:

First Prize Package – Parallax Scribbler Robot – worth $99

The Scribbler Robot is a complete robotics platform designed for ages 8 and up. It comes with a full Parallax Basic Stamp 2 processor, many sensors, and intuitive software for getting started quickly. Perfect for beginners and intermediate builders.

Second Prize Package – Micro Maestro 6-channel USB Servo Controller + Practical Arduino Book (donated by Pololu and Apress) – worth $25 + $35

Pololu’s Micro Maestro 6-channel USB servo controller allows you to control six separate servos from your PC via USB, TTL serial from a microcontroller, and allows basic scripts to be executed on the controller itself. It also incorporates general I/O. This controller is one of the best controllers on the market, with 0.25us resolution with built-in speed and acceleration control.

Practical Arduino: Cool Projects for Open Source Hardware, by Jonathan Oxer and Hugh Blemings will tech you how to create your own Arduino-based designs, learn the arduino programming language, and will guide you through many practical projects from home automation to test equipment. This book is for hobbyists and developers interested in physical computing using a low-cost, easy-to-learn platform.

Third Prize Package – Remote Control Robot Construction Set (donated by SuperDroid Robots) – worth $46

The Tamiya Remote Control Robot Construction kit provides parts for wheeled remote control robot. Twin-motor gearbox, crank-axle gearbox, remote control box, ball caster, tires, universal arm, and other parts are included. The control box has 4 channels and enables control of 4 different movements by adding separately available gearboxes. It comes with instructions for building several different robots.

Keep reading for the complete rules, and TO ENER THE GIVEAWAY!

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