Here’s three wonderful LEGO robots built by legoloverman. There’s closeups of the three (and quite a few others) in the flickr gallery.

[Via Brothers Brick]

Here’s finally some video of Ugobe’s Pleo robotic dinosaur. If you’re not up to speed on Pleo, check out our previous post on the little guy. For about $200 he’s supposed to have "life-like" motion with 14 motors and over 40 sensors. From the video, he does actually look pretty life-like. They call it a, "life-form operating system that brings robots to life." They say they’re markting the project to families as a pet, not as a toy.

However, the video didn’t show him actually walking, only moving his head around. But, for $200, I’m still interested.

For more information, check out the official Pleo website.

Well, it’s 10:21 AM. Our first preliminary run starts at 11:00 AM. As of now, two teams have made it through the gate, and two teams haven’t showed up. One team, I think the University of Florida, navigated to the acoustic pinger and surfaced.

We also have another run tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM.

The results of these runs will determine whether we make it into the finals. We can navigate through the gate just fine. We spent all night hashing out the acoustic navigation software and we’re very confident that we can find the pinger and hopefully surface. If the robot doesn’t surface we set a timeout, because we know it finds the pinger but it has trouble surfacing.

After the pinger we’re going for the pipeline then the docking station. We chose to do the docking station last because 1) it has the least amount of points associated with it and 2) there’s a chance we’ll start following the sun and run in to the wall – which would be a disqualification.


Mike, Erin, and Jim


Transdec

I’ve got a lot of audio but it’s taking a long time to edit. Fingers crossed I’ll have the first podcast up this afternoon. In the mean time, here’s a few pictures from the first day of practice.


shot of our setup


Here’s Seawolf being hoisted into the water for the first time.


Behold the beauty! Mike spent an hour and a half putting those stickers on. He’s OCD about it.

Well, I lied. Apparently I do have my camera cable. So, here’s some pictures from earlier today.

When the sun goes down, it gets pretty chilly here. Matt was freezing his butt off in the pool for a couple of hours, and now Jim is in the pool.


NCSU


University of Florida


Montreal