The Carnegie Mellon’s National Robotics Engineering Center has announced it’s plans to announce (yeah, marketing is crazy) "Crusher", its latest unmanned ground combat vehicle, to the public on April 28th. The project, which is funded by DARPA and the Army was designed to cut down casualities and protect soldiers by doing dangerous jobs, like transporting supplies and weapons.


Video and pictures of Spinner (pictured at left), Crusher’s predecessor can be found on CMU’s website.


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Is anyone out there going to the uber-cool looking Maker Faire put on by Make Magazine? ROBOT Magazine has more information on the robotics booth that will be there. Parallax will be putting on workshops for $15, and you get to take home all the hardware (Basic Stamps included!).

Is anyone out there interested in blogging about the faire for GoRobotics.net? You’ll gain international fame and fortune and the love (or envy) of all of us poor souls that can’t make it. If interested, send me an email (gallamine@gmail.com).

The event is April 22-23rd and there’s a $12 entrance fee (free for kids under 12).



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The NY Times has an excellent article on NASA’s foray into the Grand Challenge model of research and development. Instead of paying millions to contractors to develop new technologies, why not sponsor contests and only pay the winners? Folks have fun and NASA gets tons of cheap R&D.


The article talks a good bit about the Beam Power Challenge, a competition to build a robot that will climb a ribbon 200 ft into the air as quick as possible. The end goal is to create a space elevator. NASA also has a competition to build the strongest ribbon possible, to further foster development.

You can see the full list of challenges on NASA’s website.




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A group of scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology are working on yet another ultralight flying machine. The robot, currently with a 14" wingspan, is designed to fly around in indoor environment. Such environments present special problems for navigation.The researchers are trying to have the robot act like a house-fly in avoiding obstacles.


Apparently, flies tend to fly in straight lines until they encounter an obstacle, then they make a sharp 90 degree turn and continue. The scientists on the project tried to emulate this behavior by placing two cameras on the robot’s wings and maintain stability using a tiny gyroscope.

In the latest test, the robot was capable of navigating autonomously in a 7 meter x 7 meter room for up to 5 minutes straight.

Cornell is also working on tiny flying robots, along with Epson.


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Thing have been pretty stressful at the GoRobotics.net World Headquarters as of late. First I got engaged in early March, and then my father passed away in late March. Due to that I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus from blogging, but I think I’ll get back into it now.

And so this post isn’t completely useless, here’s two robot art links for your enjoyment.

First, is the art of Mark Ho at Zoho Artforms he spent six years machining the robot you see at left out of steel and bronze. His only tools were a lathe and a mill. You can read more about his sculpture at the Internet Craftmanship Museum. The sculpture contains a total of 920 handmade parts.

Next up is the more whimsical art of Ann Smith. She has a collection of robot sculptures made from scraps and broken electronics. She shows some excellent skill and ingenuity.

It’s good to be back in cyberspace.



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