Awww, who could stay mad at something like this?

From the SRL blog:

This is not the first time that the SFFD has been responsible for shows by SRL being banned both in San Francisco and elsewhere. In 1995 we were planning a show with Somarts that was funded by the BBC as part of a feature length documentary Pandemonium when the SFFD warned the then director of Somarts, Jack Davis, that any attempt to host an SRL event would result in the possible closure of Somarts. This was, according the to the SFFD representative, because SRL had ‘humiliated the SFFD in a prime time news segment that appeared on the Connie Chung show a few months earlier’.

The fire department holds grudges, but SRL are no angels either. It’s a no-win argument, I guess.

Full story, pics and video at SRL.org

Also, lizards are awesome:

The investigators found the lizards swung their tails to correct for errors made at launch. For instance, slippery surfaces made their feet skid, but the reptiles corrected for such anomalies with appropriate tail movements in mid-air.

To help confirm their findings, the scientists produced a lizard-size wheeled robot named “Tailbot” that had an aluminum tail and could leap like a ski jumper from a ramp. During each jump, the robot’s front wheels, which left the ramp first, started falling while the rear ones were still on the ramp, causing the machine to tilt downward. To avoid a nosedive into the landing pad, Tailbot corrected the angle of its body before landing by using tail movements controlled by feedback from an onboard gyroscope.

Here’s more on Tailbot and other work from Bob Full’s PolyPedal biomimetic robot lab at UC Berkeley.

Bio-inspired robots are always inspiring, especially when we can put into quantitative data why an animal is designed that way.

[Via KQEDScience from The Christian Science Monitor]

It’s nice to see that the morphing robot has come such a long way since July.

We have a spiffy little interview with Zenta, The Man Himself, which you may peruse if you care to do so.

Everybody congratulate Bentern on scooping Pop Sci, then tell him to GET BACK TO WORK.

Delusions of Self-Immolation coats the skin of the willing volunteer in flame-resistant gel, then sets them on fire. Sets. Them. On. Fire.

This is the secret wet dream of the misanthropic deeply morbid machine-art loving soul of this author. It is goddamn beautiful.

From an interview with the artist:

There are three states on the machine which I call “rare”, “medium”, and “well done”. “Rare” means you survive without any wounds. “Medium” is more for, say, the SM session or for people who like pain to understand parts of life, or to have this experience of pain. The third possibility is death. It is possible to die in this machine; I just have to change the liquid, and I have to change the timing.

There is nothing that will make you feel more alive than art that can kill you.

[via the always superlative We Make Money Not Art and the lovely @evacide]

The winner of the 1/2 Size Micromouse event at this year’s All Japan Micromouse Competition, Ng Beng Kiat, has constructed a robot that completed the maze in an impressive 3.921 seconds!

The current champion is one Ng Bent Kiat, who works at the Ngee Ann Polytechnic focusing on embedded systems and robotics. His skill and knowledge in the field of robotics shows in his winning mouse robot called the Min7.

Min7 is the first 4-wheeled robot Ng has created. It weighs just 90 grams and measures 10 x 7.5 x 2.5cm. It has a straight line speed of 3.5m/s and uses a 20MHz Hitachi 2633R processor for a brain.

The way the Micromouse Robot Competition works is a two-stage process. The robots first enter the maze and have a chance to map it out. They then get a second timed run where the object is to solve the maze as quickly as possible.

Thanks to Matthew Humphries over at Geek.com for the interesting article!

You have our gratitude.

Wired’s Eric Smalley has an awesomely titled article about a Massachusetts based startup, Harvest Automation, is testing a small farming robot to work in nurseries in the horticulture industry.

The Harvest Automation robots are knee-high, wheeled machines. Each robot has a gripper for grasping pots, a deck for carrying pots, and an array of sensors to keep track of where it is and what’s around it. Teams of robots zip around nursery fields, single-mindedly spacing and grouping plants. Think Wall-E without the doe eyes and cuddly personality, or the little forest-tending ‘bots in the 1972 sci-fi classic Silent Running.

Thank you Wired!

Via The MSNBC Future of Tech site

This is a written, blow by blow accounting and evisceration of the Killer Robots show. It’s brutal. It’s bitchy. It’s sarcastic and it probably could have used one or two things like “fact checking” and “research” and “getting off the couch once in a while”.

This of course means that it’s one of the funniest things we have ever read, hands down, whether it’s about us or not.

Perhaps the biggest letdown of this whole event is the fact that the difference between this arena and a Wal-Mart parking lot is the placement of the lines painted on the floor (and the lack of dirty diapers in the arena). What happened to the Pulverizers? What happened to the Spike Strip? Hell, there’s not even the famed Kill Saws! And really “Kill Saw” probably has a trademark on it but I mean the RoboGames people couldn’t come up with a second-best knock-off like “Discs of Inconvenience” or something?

We’re actually going ‘Disc Of Inconvenience” shopping right now.

I will say that my shiftless largely humor-free reprobate misanthrope of a partner, Mister Robotics, spent last night laughing out loud for well over an hour. This has not happened in about two years.

From the start of the show, after the weird opening montage of people screaming at robots and cowering in fear and shock, Grant Imahara introduces us all to the sport in an incredibly brief run-down that demonstrates that virtually nothing has changed in the sport since the days of BattleBots. Well, except for the addition of flamethrowers. And Grant’s teeth. Okay, maybe that was rude of me but seriously if you Google “grant imahara” one of the suggested searches is “grant imahara’s teeth”. Don’t blame me for being a racist douchebag, blame Google.

So Go here and Read This, laugh your ass off, and then tell him to call us. Seriously.

*An Addendum: I’ll have you know we do *not* play bingo in the arena, sir. It’s Keno the old folks are into. Sheesh.

Sometimes you are in the mood for something moody, something fantastically stylish and ALSO something confusing and intriguing.

Behold: mannequins, automata, style for days and also …

people behaving … as … such???

(click through to the ‘tube for embiggening)
and thank you, the ever amazing Coilhouse!

Researchers at the Mechanisms ‘N Robotics for Viable Applications have developed a robot with tank treads that mimic a gecko’s ability to climb on almost any surface.

Why mimic a gecko, you might ask:

For a climbing robot to be practical, it needs to adhere to surfaces without leaving a gooey trail. That’s why scientists are interested in dry adhesive methods, as opposed to wet adhesion, which may leave behind tacky or glue-like substances. The robot also needs to be able to traverse a wide range of surfaces. Some robots use suction, but that requires a lot of power pumping air. Other robots use claws, but those need something to grab onto. Some robots use magnets, but those only work with metal.

The robot’s treads mimic the surface of a gecko’s foot and allow it to use Van der Waals forces to hold itself up!

Also, ComBots Cup VI was awesome.

Thank you to all the teams that came by, and congrats to Original Sin for taking the Combots Cup three years in a row!