You may think that all of those crazy robot competitions that we like to cover are just fun and games, but there’s a serious side. Really, there is. For reals. Mindful of this, ROBO-ONE held the second annual Humanoid Helper Project last weekend, where teleoperated human-sized robots completed (or attempted to complete) three seemingly simple tasks, including pouring liquid from a plastic bottle into a cup, carrying ping-pong balls on a tray, and a 30 minute endurance race. I don’t know about you, but the last two would be a bit of a challenge for me, and they certainly were for the robots:

Keep in mind that these are not huge companies (or even small companies) with robots that cost millions (or even tens of thousands) of dollars. These are hobby robots. Big, fancy hobby robots, but still hobby robots. The winner was the robot with the round head, who showed a remarkable (and consistent) amount of dexterity. Now if they could only start running ROS, they could start a bottle squeezing competition too.

[ Robo Helper ] VIA [ GetRobo ]

Wondering what to do with all of that left over chocolate from Valentine’s Day? I’m not, because I ate all mine, and they aren’t in Japan either, where they held a big contest for robots with chocolate box exteriors. The 4th annual TIROL-CHOCO Robot Competition featured bipedal robots with bodies built using TIROL-CHOCO boxes racing each other and competing in chocolate target practice as well as chocolate carrying.

VIA [ Biped Robot News ]

Rubick’s Cube solving robots have gotten commonplace enough that I don’t generally post about them unless they’re especially cool, like CubeStormer. It’s not just that CubeStormer is built out of LEGO bricks, or that it’s incredibly fast at solving cubes, or that it has its own logo, but just look at it. It belongs in a sci-fi movie. It should be eating spaceships or something. But until it figures out how to do that, it’ll keep challenging the best human Rubik’s Cube solvers (and their robots).

VIA [ Gizmodo ]

Matt Bunting, a senior at the University of Arizona in electrical engineering, built himself a hexapod as a final project for his class on cognitive robotics. Built mostly from spare parts, the robot uses an Intel Atom processor powering an Ubuntu OS computer. A Logitech QuickCam mounted on the front of the bot watches what happens when movements are initiated, and uses the changing scene to determine what effect the movements are having. This lets the robot adaptively learn how to move, rather than relying on programming:

“One of the things I wanted to explore was the idea of reinforcement learning. What I wanted to do was not preprogram any of those walking algorithms, I wanted it to figure out how to walk straight forward on its own,” Bunting said. “It has the ability to figure it out itself.”

Bunting’s professor Tony Lewis says the bot’s learning algorithm can be applied to tasks other than walking. If a leg breaks or a motor gets damaged, for example, it can relearn how to walk. The robot even has foot contact sensors that can be used for terrain adaptation.

Pretty cool, right? A couple days after Matt posted a video of his bot on YouTube, Intel ordered themselves two copies to take on an international publicity tour for the Atom processor. Then, the company who provided Matt with the servos, CrustCrawler Robotics, asked Matt to help develop software for some of their hexapod kits.

So, let this be a lesson to all you DIY roboticists out there: if you build something cool, Intel will buy it, and you’ll be offered a job at a robotics company.

[ University of Arizona ] VIA [ Crave ]

Icosatetraped does, in fact, mean “twenty-four legged.” I’m not sure how to inject “soft” into that word (icostatetrasquishaped?), but this robot does have 24 soft legs. Or rather, 8 legs are soft (and moving) at any one time, while the other 16 are pressurized to carry the weight of the bot. It can move at about 1 meter per minute, which isn’t especially fast, but who cares, look at all of those little legs go! Made from plastic medical tubing, particle board, a bunch of solenoids, a Mac Mini, and some 24 volt rotary vane compressors salvaged from Gulf War nerve gas detecting equipment, this is about as DIY as it gets, and it’s awesome.

VIA [ Boing Boing ]

Hobby robots tend not to prioritize form over function, but Palro (pal-ro, robot pal, get it?) looks pretty slick with his 15″ tall molded body and LED head. He’s got 20 degrees of freedom, an integrated camera, and apparently can respond to voice control. A comprehensive library and open software package gives a lot of programming options, and an Atom processor inside ties it all together.

While Palro certainly looks cool, if you use him to do the kinds of stuff that hobby robots are good at (like backflips and somersaults and stuff), you’re bound to blow out a servo sooner or later. And from the look of things, Palro might not be the easiest (or cheapest) robot to fix. ‘Course, he’s not the cheapest robot to begin with, costing just under $3300. The first thousand units will be available March 15.

[ Press Release ] VIA [ Plastic Pals ] and [ Robonoble ]

Found this thing while looking for the robot attack video for this article… It’s a LEGO Mindstorms scorpion candy guard robot. This is why you build robots, to keep thieving thieves away from your candy that you’re hiding in the middle of a grocery store.

[ LEGO Mindstorms ]

I’ll see all those fancy wall climbing robots we posted about earlier today, and raise you a humanoid robot that climbs walls with its hands and feet, just like you and I would if we weren’t so lazy and out of shape. Programmed by Marko Wickrath, the robot isn’t just demonstrating a remarkable amount of coordinated and reproducible agility, it’s actually deciding autonomously where to place each hand and foot based on an image of the wall from an external camera and what the robot knows about its own capabilities.

The end goal, of course, is to move all of the sensing and computation on board the robot: it’ll walk up to the wall, examine hand and footholds, calculate an optimum route, and start climbing. Why am I smelling a new Robogames event here…

[ Dortmund Droids ] VIA [ Suicide Bots ]

This is why I can’t bring myself to watch gymnastics on TV. It’s just too stressful.

VIA [ Robots Dreams ]

YouTube user Paxshikai is the proud owner of what is potentially the most dangerous i-SOBOT ever, thanks to its arsenal of custom made weapons that includes crossbows, sniper rifles, machine guns, rocket launchers, and even a light saber. In celebration of his 100th (!) YouTube video of an i-SOBOT blowing things up with a variety of weaponry (or doing other weird stuff), Paxshikai put together this compilation video. I don’t know how he keeps coming up with inspiration for these vids, but I have no doubt that we’re going to see another hundred (or so). I mean, i-SOBOT has to work his way up to firing a little miniature custom made tactical nuclear warhead, and for obvious reasons, that video will most likely be the last.

[ Paxshikai ] VIA [ Robots-Dreams ]