Automatic for the people.

Do sentient machines dwell on the existential circuit
that leads to the spiritual 404 error?

Does being a machine mean just being a device:
literarily, artistically and literally?

Or does everything just boil down to everyone’s deep-seated need to crush all humans and plot eventual total world domination?

Find out at Automatic!
November 19, 20, 21, 2009
Exhibit: 5pm-8pm / Beer and wine reception 7pm-12pm on Fri & Sat
@ The lowerDeck Gallery – 2295 3rd Street
(below Sundance Coffee in San Francisco)

Robot Paintings and Sculptures from the prodigious talents of:

Doctor Popular * Josh Ellingson * I-Wei Huang * Simon Cox * Nils
Jawa * Jonathan Foote * Camp Peavy * Alice Koswara * Max Chandler * Eliot K. Daughtry * Adam Davis * Patrick Lake * Phoneticontrol * Mike Hales * Bill Robinson, Liz Mamorsky and many many others!

*”My God, it’s full of robots!”

Here’s a bit more about this weekend of splendor:

Is it the end of September already? Why, that means that it’s almost time for Arse Elektronika — San Francisco’s annual festival devoted to sex, tech, futurism, and, of course, robots and the people who love to fuck them.
Conference, film festival, DIY workshops, performances.

Oct 1-4, 2009. San Francisco.

With talks, machines and performances by Allen Stein, R. U. Sirius, Noah Weinstein, Randy Sarafan, Uncle Abdul, Jonathon Keats, Ani Niow, Jason Scott, Annalee Newitz, Rainer Prohaska, Douglas Spink, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Violet Blue, Eleanor Saitta, Reesa Brown, Saul Albert, Monika Kribusz, Kim De Vries, Pepper Mint, Micha Cárdenas, Rose White, Elle Mehrmand and many more…

+++++++++++++

Up-to-date info on festival site!

Tickets Can Be Purchased Here!

We would like to invite all your hackers, tweaker, circuit benders, kinetical junkies, experimenters and mad scientists bent on world domination to the increasingly annual

INTERNATIONAL ROBOGAMES 2010

Photo courtesy Dave Schumaker (@rockbandit on Twitter

That’s right, you hungry little mechanical demon spawn, RoboGames is back, in its new home at the always delightful San Mateo County Fairgrounds, just mere moments away from San Francisco. Readers familiar with MakerFaire will find this venue extremely familiar.

There are over 80 different events offered at Robogames, even if you have never built a robot before (and definitely if you *have*) there is an event that is right for you! See all the rules and regs over at RoboGames.

Registration info coming soon! Stay Tuned!

Use our robot to talk to MPs. Commissioned by v, the National Young Volunteers Service, we’re offering 16-25s the chance to talk to their MPs in an innovative way. They tell us what they care about, and the robot will write it out in Parliament. Nifty, huh?

The Voicebot pt 1 from sidekick studios on Vimeo.

via Adil

This video made in advance of Robogames 2009, of a few competitors from UPITA in Mexico (like MIT here). It’s quite a good video, if you like minisumo and have 5 minutes and 57 seconds to spare today give it a watch!

[Update: the video embed is a little bit cut off, you still get the gist, but to see the movie at full width go here.

[Gracias GIOSER!]

ROS is a delightfully open source, clean-interfaced operating system for robots that could be poised to become a major cross platform OS. Wait, there’s more. In addition, Willow Garage is also floating the idea of a “robot app store” that I imagine could take a lot of wheel reinvention out of the robot programming process.
From H+ Magazine:

“Right now, cobbling together the various pieces of software needed to make a robot work is a complex process. If you buy commercial robotics hardware (like, say, the Nao humanoid robot from Aldebaran Robotics, which I’ve done some work with lately myself), then certain functions come with the robot’s pre-packaged control software. But, to get the robot to do anything else, you need to either write your own code, or download other folks’ code and integrate it yourself. It’s a process that generally requires considerable expertise and a lot of fiddling and trial and error. The situation is no better if you build your own robot according to your own plans or open-source ones. The “robot app store” idea aims to simplify the process of making robots functional.”

Mister Robotics has Views on robot operating systems of all kinds. His Views are very well reasoned and thought out, however I’ll let him do his own damn post so he can bring you the full nuance of his position. His short answer is that robots don’t need an OS because it ads an extra layer of complexity that doesn’t need to be there, and if one is any good at coding one can get the bot to do whatever one wants. Please keep in mind, however, that Mister Robotics also hand codes the HTML (html!) for every single site he’s ever done, and thinks that cars with computers are cheating. For what it’s worth, he also wears Bill Cosby sweaters around the house and is growing a lawn out front for the specific purpose of yelling at kids to get off it, so he’s coming from a special place, as are most robot guys with his background. Let the religious wars begin.

Okay, now, robot OS philosophical tangle aside, app store. Sounds great, but this next concept is really cool (assuming you have enough reliable code in your robot to make it smart enough to be able to identify problems and search on a consistent basis):

Or, more futuristically, robots themselves could go online in real-time and download new apps enabling them to solve problems that are stumping them at the moment. Maybe your Nao is trying to pick up some jello and can’t do it — the jello keeps slipping between his fingers. Instead of crying “Help!” to its programmer, it can go to the robot app store and enter the search terms “grasp slippery” — and find that my Nao’s “slippery object grasping” app is highly rated, and then download it and use it.

Or maybe you have another sort of robot (say, a PR3) rather than a Nao — but your PR3 has three-fingered hands similar to the Nao. Then, your robot should be able to download my Nao’s “slippery object grasping” routine too, if they’re both running the same robot operating system, or at least interoperable OS’s.

These two concepts are Wilow Garage’s way od addressing the state of robotic programming standards nowadays, to wit:

Today: We have a messy situation, with various robots running various pieces of control software combined using various (often custom-built) frameworks.

Whoa that sounds familiar. Hey robot! The 80s called! They want their software and hardware evolution timeline back eventually, but you can borrow it for now!

[via the twitter prolific @timoreilly]

This video featuring the Bagger 288 large-scale industrial mining bucket-wheel excavator, is one such work.

[via @iidocracy on Twitter]

From the Guardian UK:

Meet the Guardian Robot: This friendly little fellow stands on your desk and monitors your Twitter feed for “happy” and “sad” posts by your friends on your Twitter feed. But unlike conventional alert systems, this robot encourages you to interact with the posts it finds.

• You can follow the Guardian Robot on its own Twitter account at http://twitter.com/guardianrobot. Send him a message with a “#highfive” hashtag to get a high five, or send him a “#ineedahug” hashtag if you are feeling low.

You can also see the Guardianbot live over the magical interwebs (when he is broadcasting) here!

(via Makezine!)

Mmm, precision snack foods.

$160 off the amazon price… A full 66% off retail price.