[via Facebook]
Jason Lentz has an amazing cardboard robot costume, and frequents events like Burning man and the recent Maker Fair in SF. He has quite a collection of robot suit iterations in his Flickr page, and if you’re feeling envious, you can buy one of his robot arms on Etsy for a mere $85 USD or attempt to make your own with his provided schematics. You can also check out Jason’s fan page on Facebook.
From the same folks that brought us the Wild World of Robots, comes the Cyborgs On The Screen infographic. Full graphic after the jump.
Bots High is a work in progress documentary by Director Joey Daoud. The film documents the efforts of several high school combat robot teams leading up the Combat Robot National Championship. In order to hire a professional film team to cover the mayhem at the Championship, Daoud is looking to raise $9,000. He’s asking robot fans to chip in to support his effort. The funds will cover expenses as the film crew covers both the finals in Miami and in San Francisco, and interviews several luminaries in the BattleBot field, like Trey Roski and Greg Munson, creators of BattleBots.
The second [Championship] is the National BattleBots Championship in San Francisco, which is open to anyone who wants to build a robot. Some of the high school teams will take their chances and travel all the way across the country with their robot to compete in a 120 lb. open class and see if they can hold their own against professional robot builders.
Daoud’s goal is to produce a film that is, “entertaining to all yet motivating to kids and teenagers to see how fun and exciting match and science can be.” If you’d like to help out, visit the Bots High KickStarter page.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
Special Thanks to Our Sponsors! BUY STUFF FROM THEM:
Russian gas company Gazprom wants to build an oil pipeline from Vyborg, Russia to Greifswald, Germany. The pipeline will supply 26 million homes with natural gas for heating. There’s one big problem though – the pipeline runs over the Baltic Sea-floor which is still covered by up to 150,000Â unexploded mines placed there during World War II. In order to allow the $10 billion USD project to continue, Bactec International has been hired to build an underwater robot to find and detonate the unexploded ordinances that lie in the path of the pipeline.
The robot, which will help perform the biggest commercial mine-clearance project ever, will locate approximately 70 mines, each filled with over 600 lbs of explosives. Once the exact location of each mine is determined, a support ship will warn any others ships in the area to leave, monitor for marine animals in the area, and the robot will maneuver a smaller (10 lbs) detonation charge near the unexploded ordinance. Once all ships, the robot, and any marine animals are clear of the area, the mine is destroyed and the robot will return to recover the remains of the bomb.
[Via Slashdot]
Boilerplate, the fictional robot created by artist Paul Guinan, now has a robolicious coffee-table book called Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel. Featuring historic scenes from the 19th and 20th century, we see Boilerplate’s military prowess as he fights along-side military giants like Teddy Roosevelt and Pancho Villa. The book’s “trailer” is hilarious and worth a watch (after the jump.)
Boilerplate was a mechanical man developed by Professor Archibald Campion during the 1880s and unveiled at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
Built in a small Chicago laboratory, Boilerplate was a prototype soldier for use in resolving the conflicts of nations. Although it was the only such prototype, Boilerplate was eventually able to exercise its proposed function by participating in several combat actions.
Unfortunately Boilerplate was lost to history during WW1 and his final location remains a mystery to this day. According to wikipedia, some speculate he was captured by Germans and used to fuel their mighty technological advances between the wars.
Great alternate history.
BOILERPLATE: History of a Victorian Era Robot.
[Via io9.com]
Intel is cooking up something, and they’re using stereotypical engineers and some gadget-y sort of glove to advertise it. Check out the video, help support GoRobotics, and post your conspiracy theory in the comments.
I’m not quite sure what to make of this, but iRobot just posted a music video to their YouTube channel featuring the music of Lansdown and lots of footage of Packbots blowing up things. See it below:
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Retro Robo Sculpture by Mike Rivamonte
Here’s a great gallery of retro robot art creations. There quite an array of intricate robot sculptures from a variety of artists. The robot pictured above was created by artist Mike Rivamonte. There’s a few more of my favorites after the jump.
What’s your favorite?
Carebot comes fully equipped to take care of your every need – hot meals, fluffying your pillow …Â oh, and fully trained in proctology.
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“Hey, since the news and historical accounts are so great when they’re crowsourced, how about robots! That’d be a GREAT idea.”
Check out more of Ben’s art here.
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