Jonathan Butler: Re:Robotics

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 02:14:21 GMT

Robotics Company Plans an Offering. The iRobot Corporation, maker of the Roomba vacuum cleaner and the PackBot bomb-disarming robot, said on Tuesday that it was planning an initial public stock offering valued at up to $115 million. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. [NYT > Business]

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 17:57:51 GMT

Pixar artists launch indie comix company, blogs at Comic Con. Xeni Jardin:
Several artists from Pixar are joining forces to create comic book titles as E-Ville Press (short for Emeryville, where Pixar headquarters are located). Their work debuts at Comic Con in San Diego, July 13-17. Several titles will have corresponding blogs. Most of the artwork was digitally generated.

Titles include:

"Colossus" by Mark Andrews - A knight's soul is trapped in a war machine's metal body, and faces a kingdom's evil paladin.
"Rose and Isabel" by Ted Mathot - A story of two sisters who join the American Civil War to save their three brothers.
"Afterworks" - an anthology of short stories by Simon Dunsdon, Robert Kondo, Nate Stanton, Max Brace, Kevin O'Brien, Sanjay Patel, Louis Gonzales and Jay Shuster. Story previews here.

Several other Pixar artists will be attending Comic Con, with their own booths. They include Ronnie Del Carmen with "Paper Biscuit 2.5 - Froggy's Lament"; Enrico Casarosa with "SketchCrawling"; and Jamie Baker with "Rocket Rabbit"

(Thanks, The Moth!) [Boing Boing]

Sat, 22 Jan 2005 20:09:14 GMT

Army Prepares 'Robo-Soldier' for Iraq (AP). AP - The rain is turning to snow on a blustery January morning, and all the men gathered in a parking lot here surely would prefer to be inside. But the weather couldn't matter less to the robotic sharpshooter they are here to watch as it splashes through puddles, the barrel of its machine gun pointing the way like Pinocchio's nose. [Yahoo! News: Technology]

Sun, 14 Nov 2004 12:35:49 GMT

Robodump 1.0 - an excellent prank. Mark Frauenfelder:

Kevin Kelm made a robot that looks like someone taking a dump. You can listen to the soundtrack at his site.

RoboDump is a robot. Sort of. And it poops. Sort of. Forever. A horrible, never-ending bowel movement complete with straining grunts, horrific gas, splashes, and pee sounds.
I snuck RoboDump into the men's room at the office. Unfortunately, today turned out to be the day of a board meeting. Whoops! It still went over well; the office was abuzz all morning with gossip about the guy in the bathroom. Several people theorized it was the CFO. The janitor commented to someone in the hallway that he wanted to clean the restroom but "this guy's been in there all morning."

Link

[Boing Boing]

Thu, 21 Oct 2004 15:18:53 GMT

Rise of the Robots: Segway Platform Gives Mechanoids Motion (SPACE.com). SPACE.com - A military project aimed at building smarter robots has given researchers the wheels they need to make their automatons go. [Yahoo! News: Science]

Wed, 21 Jul 2004 15:29:28 GMT

Robot librarian. Researchers at Universitat Jaume I in Spain are designing a robot librarian of sorts. The three-wheeled bot listens for verbal book requests, heads to the approximate location of the title on a shelf, and uses digital cameras to read the spines. The toughest challenge is engineering a grasper with "fingernails" to pull out the book, Professor Angel del Pobil told the BBC:

"It is mimicking the way we manipulate our hands. We have constant feedback from tactile sensors, so it is moving very slowly. In the first experiments, the books really got damaged because it was pressing too hard. Now it touches gently."

Link [Boing Boing]

Thu, 27 May 2004 13:49:30 GMT

Reading, Writing, and Robots: kids build bots at CeBIT. StreetTech has some great snapshots of the robot-building competition between local high-schoolers in NYC, called NYC FIRST, which exhibited at NY CeBIT. (Thanks, Nate!)
Link [Boing Boing]

Fri, 21 May 2004 15:25:23 GMT

NASA to Launch Robot Aircraft Program (AP). AP - NASA said Thursday it is launching a program that could place robot planes and aircraft flown by human pilots in the same airspace by 2008. [Yahoo! News - Science]

Fri, 12 Mar 2004 22:52:39 GMT

Robot Builders Have Eyes on the Prize (washingtonpost.com). washingtonpost.com - Think of it as a government-sponsored science fair with a tad more than a blue ribbon at stake. [Yahoo! News - Technology]

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 12:49:19 GMT

Invasion of the robots. From medicine to military, machines finally arrive. [CNET News.com - Front Door]

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 12:48:04 GMT

Robot grunts tumble in race for $1m prize. Testing. Testing. [The Register]

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 12:45:38 GMT

Robotic Legs Could Produce Super Troops (AP). AP - Move over Bionic Man and make room for BLEEX [~] the Berkeley Lower Extremities Exoskeleton, with strap-on robotic legs designed to turn an ordinary human into a super strider. [Yahoo! News - Science]

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 12:37:24 GMT

Teams Await Final Trials for Robot Race (AP). AP - Twenty teams seeking a bid in a $1 million race of self-navigating robots across the Mojave Desert rushed to fix mechanical and software problems as they awaited the final trials. [Yahoo! News - Science]

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 12:17:04 GMT

Robots That Build (but Still Won't Do Windows) [New York Times: Technology]

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 12:11:45 GMT

Robot Racers Catch a Break. Robot vehicles were having a tough time completing the qualifying course for the Grand Challenge, so Darpa has rewritten the rules to let almost anyone compete. By Noah Shachtman. [Wired News]

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 12:02:53 GMT

Darpa Takes Battle to the Streets. The Pentagon's dream factory is always looking for new tech for the U.S. military, but the situation in Iraq has it pleading for urban-aware systems. Noah Shachtman reports from Anaheim, California. [Wired News]

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 11:43:22 GMT

New DARPA Grand Challenge live action website. Just launched: a website promising live virtual coverage of this weekend's Grand Challenge race, in which robotic vehicles will race accross the California desert.

Live Tracking will show relative positions of the Challenge entrants, and requires a 7 MB download each time you use your browser to view the tracking. The Status Board provides a 30 second update of the status of each Challenge team. The Image Gallery will contain the most recent images from the Challenge, updated nightly through March 14.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 21:04:38 GMT

DARPA Grand Challenge article No Riders: Desert Crossing Is for the Robots Only [New York Times: Technology]

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 20:39:35 GMT

US nanotechnology funding called for. More emphasis is needed on engineering and research, Intel exec says [InfoWorld: Top News]

Fri, 09 Jan 2004 02:05:37 GMT

Mobile Robots Take Baby Steps. Darpa and U.S. Army researchers try to design robots that can traverse all types of terrain, but the machines will need legs to pull off the task. And that's a big hurdle. By Noah Shachtman. [Wired News]