So many areas of business, entertainment, and sports have a Hall of Fame. Did you know there’s even a Robot Hall of Fame? There has been since 2003. It’s the brainchild of those prodigious crania over at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. The  2006 Inductees have just been announced.  They are (the envelope please): Maria [...]

  Pointers to the Leaf Project have been floating around cyberspace for a while now, but if it’s not on your radar, it should be. It’s fascinating work in open source AI and robot development being done at the Robotics Society of Southern California. It began as an Artificial Life program for Bruce Weimer. Robotics [...]

How can you look at this collection of robot booty and not salivate all over your keyboard? Robot Magazine  has a first look at Bioloid, a series of “edutainment” robotics kits from Korean company Robotis. The kits were shown off at the recent Consumer Electronics Show and apparently caused a bit of a stir. Like [...]

  MIT’s Rodney Brooks has an adage (to paraphrase): A bunch of working “dumb” bots (i.e. robots w/little computing power that sense and react directly to their environment) is better than one broken “smart” bot (i.e. a robot that maps its world, plans optimal routes through it, etc). I propose a corollary: A robot that [...]

If you need any convincing about the utility of using biology as inspiration in robotic engineering, check out this amazing video of a robotic snake (and the real snake motion studies on which it was based). Dubbed the ACM-R5, and being developed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, it sports a sophisticated attitude/torque sensing system, [...]

Thanks to Jeff James, LEGO, and everyone here at Nxtbot for inviting me to guestblog. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to talk about one of my favorite subjects: robots. Fancying myself something of a generalist/whole systems guy, I always like to look for patterns that connect my interests, so in talking about robots, I’ll [...]