I don’t entirely understand pro wrestling. I also don’t entirely understand Japan. So obviously I don’t understand Japanese Pro Wrestling, but that’s not going to stop me from posting about it, when it’s Japanese Pro Robot Wrestling. It IS going to stop me from explaining it to you in its entirety because, like I said, I just don’t really get it. If I had to guess, though, I’d say that the differences include emotionally compelling back stories and maybe even some fixed matches that encourage the robots teaming up pull off some of the more improbably spectacular moves. And masks, there are masks.

The next Robot Professional Wrestling Match will take place on September 25th, and you can watch it live on UStream TV from 3:30 pm to 7:00 pm in Japan, which I’m pretty sure is 11:30 am on September 24th here on the west coast. And if you have a better idea of what all this about than I do, please let us know in the comments.

[ UStream ] VIA [ Biped Robot News ]

The first ever Robot Survival Game was just barley two months ago, but it looks like everybody managed to patch up their robots’ tinfoil hats and round two took place last weekend. Until you guys start ponying up to send me to Japan, we’ll have to rely on Iketomu’s excellent coverage:

Once again, my favorite robot is definitely Vanga, the spidery looking bot with secret wheels that lets it lift up its legs and zip around.

Lots more videos at the link below.

[ Biped Robot News ]

Japan seems to always be at the forefront of creative hobby biped robots, and the 18th Robo-One contest is certainly no exception. Biped Robot News has tons of coverage, but I’ve reposted some vids of my personal favorites, of which Tokotokomaru takes the cake with its incredibly awesome head-mounted ducted fans:

Apparently, this is legal in combat:

Garoo will open a beer for you:

Two more, after the jump. (Read more…)

The 2010 International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition took place last week, and the very first thing that happened was that everybody decided that they’d much rather spend their time building robot subs as opposed to gasping out the name of the competition, so it’s now just called “RoboSub.” These RoboSubs are autonomous (not remote controlled), so the competition operates kinda like the DARPA Grand or Urban Challenge: you push the go button, and then your robot is on its own, and you can do nothing but sit back and have an anxiety attack.

As you can see from the vid, the bots have a lot of fairly complicated tasks to perform, and I imagine that being underwater causes a whole host of sensor issues… For example, several tasks require the robots to differentiate colored objects, and colors change underwater depending on depth as the red light gets filtered out. Not to mention the whole water not mixing with electronics thing…

Day 2 and the day 3 final, after the jump. (Read more…)

About a month ago we saw some Robot Survival Game test footage, but the actual competition took place in Japan just last week. Eight robots entered the fray, which is much like Mech Warfare in that the robots are armed (with airsoft guns) and controlled remotely via onboard cameras. The most significant difference between the two competitions seems to be that the Survival Game doesn’t penalize robots for having more legs and allows other mobility systems, leading to some pretty interesting designs.

The hit sensors, by the way, are brilliant in their simplicity and effectiveness: the ‘tinfoil hats’ are covering light sensors, and when holes are shot in the tinfoil, the sensors register more light. When a certain threshold is reached, the robot is declared destroyed.

Some of the robots designed for this contest are pretty sweet… My favorite has to be this one, called ‘Vanga:’

Not only does Vanga have six legs, it’s also got some wheels underneath, which enable it to squad down, lift up its legs, and zip around:

There’s a five legged robot in the mix too, and it’s much more nimble than you might think.

Check out more competition vids at the link below.

[ Biped Robot News ]

It may take a big robot to bring you one bottle of beer, but it takes a little robot to haul around six bottles. Or anyway, that’s the idea of the Bottle Traction event at the Wonderful Robot Carnival in Japan, where hobby robots compete to haul the most bottles over a given distance as fast as possible. The robots can push, pull, jump, or whatever, as long as they get the job done. Sometimes they do manage to the the job done, but as you can see from the video, the rest of the time it’s just funny.

VIA [ Robots Dreams ]

NASA’s Centennial Challenges are technology development contests open to anyone, kinda like the DARPA challenges. This means that if you (you!) have a good idea as to how to go about solving one of the problems they present, you have just as good a chance as anyone else at snagging one of the prizes. Here are the three new challenges for 2010:

The Nano-Satellite Launch Challenge: to place a small satellite into Earth orbit, twice in one week. The prize purse is $2 million. The goals of this challenge are to stimulate innovations in low-cost launch technology and encourage creation of commercial nano-satellite delivery services.

Night Rover Challenge: to demonstrate a solar-powered exploration vehicle that can operate in darkness using its own stored energy. The prize purse is $1.5 million. The objective is to stimulate innovations in energy storage technologies of value in extreme space environments, such as the surface of the moon, or for electric vehicles and renewable energy systems on Earth.

Sample Return Robot Challenge: to demonstrate a robot that can locate and retrieve geologic samples from a wide and varied terrain without human control. The prize purse is $1.5 million. The objectives are to encourage innovations in automatic navigation and robotic manipulator technologies.

NASA’s budget for these challenges has been increased to $10 million per year through 2015, so hopefully we’ll see even more of them. As I’ve said before (relating to an earlier NASA challenge), this system seems like such a great way to spur creativity and innovation, especially considering what a huge return can be had on what (for a government agency) is more or less a trivial sum.

[ NASA ]

These robots don’t have much on the Spain-Germany game yesterday, but that’s okay… RoboCup still has 40 years to achieve their goal of creating a humanoid robot that can defeat a world class homo sapiens soccer team.

Team NimbRo from the University of Bonn won the TeenSize tournament at RoboCup 2010, and also took home the Louis Vuitton (?) Best Humanoid Award. Grats!

[ Team NimbRo ]

This year’s RoboCup 2010 KidSize championship match was all German, with the FUmanoids from Berlin against the Darmstadt Dribblers. This is no surprise, since it was the exact same final match in 2009. The Dribblers took home the trophy (not sure if there’s actually a trophy), and before you leave unimpressed, remember that this is a fully autonomous match, with the robots relying entirely on their programming and a webcam on their head to find the ball and then decide what to do with it.

More vids, after the jump. (Read more…)

Pay attention, England: This robot has grit. This robot has determination. This robot is not getting paid anything, and is just playing for the love of the game (or maybe because it’s programmed to). But most importantly, this robot takes a dive at 30 seconds in and then gets right back up again.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

This robot is DARwin, from Virginia Tech’s Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa). More specifically, this is DARwin-LC (where the LC stands for “low cost”) which made its debut at RoboCup 2010 in Singapore last week. There’s also a DARwin-HP, where HP means “high performance,” implying more expensive servos and sensors. The basic idea is to make DARwin-LC cheap (on the humanoid robot scale), with DARwin-HP out there as an option if you need the extra power and precision.

DARwin is being developed on a National Science Foundation grant specifically to make robotics research, education, and outreach more accessible (read: affordable). As you might expect, the grant goes on to say:

The research results from the humanoid-robotics community will find applications in assistive robotics technology for the elderly, intelligent humanoids, and homeland security and the military.

Today, they play soccer. Tomorrow, they learn how to do community service and (sometimes) be destructive.

Yep, just like professional soccer players. Wonderful.

[ RoMeLa ] VIA [ Robots Dreams ]