Reuters reports: “Dec. 2 - Robots from around Japan have been competing for the title strongest two-legged robot in the world. Around 25 powerful world-class competitors gathered for the Robo-One ground championships at Tokyo’s convention centre. The spectacle strikes a close resemblance to a real boxing or mixed martial arts match as robots trade jabs, dodge punches and eventually knock out opponents with a crushing blow.”

“Crushing blows” include a totally awesome balloon head missile, and robots that must have been designed to destroy through the medium of overwhelming holiday cheer. Click here to view the championship match over at Suicide Bots.

[ Reuters ] VIA [ Spluch ]

The DARPA Urban Challenge for robotic vehicles concluded on Saturday, with Carnegie Mellon’s robotic 2007 Chevy Tahoe, named Boss, taking top honors and the $2 million first prize. In contrast to the first DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004, where no robots completed the course, there were six finishers this year, although the last few took longer than the six hour time limit. Still, it’s a pretty impressive feat for a robotic car to spend six hours on the road completing tasks among other cars with no human guidance whatsoever. Here’s some short clips from the event; hopefully we’ll see more video in not too long:

The critical point here is that all of the robots were able to make good decisions when confronted with complicated variables and rapidly changing situations. The top three committed NO traffic violations over the 60 mile course. The deciding factor then became speed, and at an average speed of 14 mph, Boss won out by a 20 minute margin over second place Stanford (average speed 13 mph), winners of the first DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005.

[ DARPA Urban Challenge ] VIA [ Danger Room ]

The qualifiers for the DARPA Urban Challenge started on October 26, with 35 teams competing for 20 slots in the finals, which will start November 3rd. If you’re not familiar with the DARPA Grand Challenge series, the first successful one took place in 2005. It was an off road race for driverless vehicles over a 132 mile stretch of rugged Mojave desert terrain. The vehicles used GPS, cameras, lasers, and a ton of complicated software to navigate themselves over the course, and in the end, three of them made it. You can watch an awesome hour long NOVA program on the race online here. The next challenge, taking place this year, places the robot cars in an urban environment, where they will have to contend with speed limits, stop signs, and other cars. The vehicles will have to traverse the 60 mile environment in less than 6 hours with no human intervention to win the $3.5 million prize, and they’ll have to obey all California state traffic laws along the way, which is something that most people probably can’t pull off. Danger Room has some excellent coverage of the first few, uh, fatalities. The final will be webcast live on November 3rd, check the DARPA website for details.

[ DARPA Urban Challenge ]

By Evan Ackerman

The thing about robots is, even if they’re designed to do practical stuff, they’re just so cool that you can’t help playing with them whenever the opportunity arises. CMU’s robotics manipulation class fell victim to this temptation by staging a head-to-head bowloff between two robot arms. The premise was simple: try and get the most pegs into the opponent’s goal, while protecting your own goal. The exact methods were up to each team (note how each arm throws slightly differently, for example), and some of the tactics got pretty involved:

Robot bowling. Doesn’t get much better than that.

[ Society of Robots ]

In yet another instance of bots imitating human life, scientists at the University of British Columbia have constructed surgical robots that they hope will perform the medical feats of the future. Since the future is not here yet, today they will be playing a large version of the “Operation” game.

Second-year students will work in teams and create prototype “surgeons”. The goal will be to see which robot can remove the most metal parts in two minutes. Of course, they have to be careful not to remove the wrong part and just like the classic game, try not to bump the sides of the “incisions”. They fail to mention whether a wrong move is accompanied by the familiar angry buzzer or not. The robots are being built completely from scratch and will be operated autonomously with no remote controls whatsoever.

Check out the video after the jump. It starts with a cartoon, has robots AND Operation. Need I say more?

(Read more…)

By Evan Ackerman

The above video shows the IBoat, an autonomous miniature sailboat designed to take part in the Microtransat Challenge, a transatlantic sailing race for little robotic sailboats. It might not quite be the DARPA Grand Challenge, but these are little sailboats, and they’ll be all alone on a big ocean. They’ll have to figure out how to choose the best course between GPS points based on the wind, doing all of the operations a normal sailboat does. Even the most basic operations, like tacking, require some skill and forethought, as well as awareness of the current weather conditions.

The boats themselves are about 4 meters long with a weight of 40 kg and aren’t allowed to use any method of propulsion other than the wind. The transatlantic race is scheduled for sometime in late 2008, with several shorter races taking place beforehand to allow teams to test their craft. Next up: equipping the boats with miniature pirate flags and cannon and making it a real contest.

[ Microtransat ] VIA [ New Scientist ]

All the robots seem to be dancing lately. I wonder if they have a new dance show in the works. It’s beginning to get a bit competitive.

Humanoido, an online robot friend of Robots-Dreams.com wrote in to tell them about some new software he developed that converted the 4″ tall Parallax Penguin robot into a dancing machine. Check out his imitation of Mumbles from the Happy Feet movie. Pretty impressive and needless to say, the cuteness factor goes off the chart.

But the story does not end there. i-SOBOT just had to respond to that video, with a Latin number that will leave you wanting more.

So, who is the winner? Who cares? Robots are dancing! We all win!

[Robots-Dreams]

By Evan Ackerman

Every other month there seems to be some sort of harder/better/faster/stronger robot competition going on, but this might be a first… The Baka RoboCup (”baka” means “foolish” or “stupid” in Japanese) aims to pit funny robots against each other in a mechanical comedy gigglematch. The rules are simple: each robot will have two minutes to impress a (human) audience and panel of judges and may the best (or worst) robot win. The robots themselves must be mechanical, they must make people laugh without the use of explosives (yes, that’s in the rules), and they must be totally impractical and worthless in any capacity besides humor. The contest is set for November 4 in Tokyo, and the winning robot gets 500,000 yen (about $4200) to spend on whatever it is the world’s stupidest robot spends money on.

[ BakaRobo (In Japanese) ] VIA [ Pink Tentacle ]

It may surprise you to learn that swifts are the some of the most efficient, most maneuverable, and fastest birds in the world, reaching speeds of over 100 mph in level flight. It’s no surprise, then, that Dutch engineering students have modeled a new generation of micro airplanes after the swift. RoboSwift is shaped exactly like it’s namesake, down to the shape-shifting wings that fold back like an F-14. It has a 50 cm wingspan and weighs in at 80 grams, and will be able to power it’s beak-mounted propeller for 20 minutes at a stretch with an onboard lithium polymer battery.

RoboSwift doesn’t get it’s swiftiness just from it’s looks. It’s actually designed to autonomously follow a group of real swifts while collecting ground surveillance with three micro cameras. I’m not sure if the real swifts are likely to tolerate that behavior for very long, but it should help the robot maintain the illusion of being a bird rather than a plane for at least a bit longer than normal. RoboSwift is set to make it’s debut in March of 2008 at the American-Asian Micro Air Vehicle competition in India.

VIA [ Fareastgizmos ]