Hi everyone, it’s been a while since I posted – had my birthday last week, so it made things a little bit crazy for me. You can all congratulate me on turning twenty-two for the fourth time. Feels good, turning twenty-two again.

I may have mentioned some time ago that I’m working on an interview with Angelica Lim of (take a deep breath) Okuno & Ogata Laboratory Speech Media Processing Group at the Department of Intelligence Science and Technology of the Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University. That’s an extremely detailed description of a department! You can visit their website here.

Next week, I’ll be bringing you more details on all the robots in Angelica’s lab, as well as a breifing on thier published papers as well as how their recent conference presentations went over. It’ll be exciting, so watch for it.

In the meantime, Angelica has a great video of a robot she works with playing a theremin alongside her flute-playing to ‘Angels We Have Heard on High’ – check it out right here, you won’t be disappointed.

Happy hacking, and more soon!

RobotBox user jbot added a nifty blog post today about using his robot to paint with light. Inspired by images of Roomba’s with LEDs, he added a set of LEDs to his robot, PlexiBot and took some long exposure photos as PlexiBot traveled around. The results are quite beautiful.

It’s that time again! Time for the March celebration of GoRobotics’ 10th Birthday. We’re once again giving away fabulous robot prizes to 3 lucky winners. Previous contests have been great, and we’re excited to be doing it again with prizes from our sponsors Pololu, Super Droid Robots, Zagros Robotics, Solarbotics and No Starch Press.

There are four ways of entering this month’s contest:

1. Simply comment on this post and tell us your favorite robot websites.
2. Follow GoRobotics on Twitter and leave a comment below telling us your Twitter username.
3. Follow RobotBox on Twitter and leave a comment below telling us your Twitter username.
4. Retweet the following, “Enter @GoRobotics.net’s 10 Year Birthday Robot Giveaway http://wp.me/pgDpL-kM“. Leave a comment when you do.

YOU CAN DO ALL FOUR (four comments) TO INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING!

Winners will be chosen at random. Three winners will be chosen and the first winners will get his/her choice of the prizes, second place gets second choice and third place gets whatever is left over! The contest ends MARCH 31st, 2010 at 12AM EST. Comments are moderated to prevent spam. Your comment won’t show up till the moderator has approved it. Here are this month’s prizes:

1st Place Prize – Orangutan B-328 Robot Controller (donated by Pololu), 2x 24V 195 RPM Gear Motors (donated by Super Droid Robots), and The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Idea Book (donated by No Starch Press) – worth $100

The Baby Orangutan B-328 robot controller from Pololu is the perfect choice for a brain for your robot. Its 24 pin compact form allows it to fit into very small robots without sacrificing its powerful AVR microcontroller and 2 channel motor drivers. Yep, that’s right – this little guy is both a controller and a motor driver! All you need to add is sensors and some motors. It has an ATMega328P processor, an onboard potentiometer and LED, and 32 KB flash, 2 KB RAM, and 1 KB EEPROM. The motor driver can handle up to 1A continuos per channel, 3A peak.

These powerful 24V motors donated by Super Droid Robots will kick-start your next robot project. They are high-quality motors with steel gears (not cheap plastic), and used in Super Droid’s All-terrain robots. They use a 1:27 gear reduction and have an amazing 12 kgf-cm of torque. That means they could lift a 26 lb (12 kg) load using a 1 cm lever arm! They are rated for < 250 mA of drive current. Note: These motors are probably  bit too big to be driven directly from the Baby Orangutan B-328P. Try the Dual MC33926 Motor Driver Carrier

The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Idea Book features chapters on programming and design, CAD-style drawings, and abundance of screenshots make it easy for the reader to master the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT kit and to build and program nine example robots. Chapters cover using the NXT programming language (NXT-G) as well as troubleshooting; design; software; sensors; Bluetooth; even how to create a NXT remote control.

2nd Place Prize – Arduino Duemilanove, Tamiya Gear Box and Sport Tires (donated by Zagros Robotics), and The Unofficial LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Inventor’s Guide (donated by No Starch Press) - worth $75

The Arduino Duemilanove is a powerful and simple robot controller built around the AtMega328P microcontroller. It comes with a bootloader already on the device so you can easily write and download programs using only a USB cable. It has many digital and analog IO lines to make connecting it to your project easy.

The Tamiya double gearbox is perfect for use in amateur robot contests, this gearbox is suitable for use with remote controlled robots. Choice of 4 gear ratios, offers emphasis on speed or power to suit your needs. Left/right independent design means you can set different gear ratios for either side. Coupled with the Sport Tire set, you’ll have a great robot propulsion system to hook up to your Duemilanove.

The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT set is a very powerful robotics toolkit, but it lacks a detailed user’s guide. This is the user’s guide that every MINDSTORMS owner needs. The Unofficial LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Inventor’s Guide begins by introducing the NXT set and directing the reader through setup. Following this is an in-depth discussion of the set’s electronic elements and other LEGO pieces as well as building techniques. Next, it covers the NXT-G programming environment and introduces several unofficial programming languages, providing examples of code and programming insights along the way. Finally, it presents a method for designing NXT robots in addition to a series of projects with building and programming instructions for creating complete robots.

3rd Place Prize – Herbie the Mousebot Kit (donated by Solarbotics), and LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Thinking Robots (donated by No Starch Press) – worth $75

The Herbie the Mousebot Kit from Solarbotics is a great way to introduce ourself or a child to robotics. The kit is a 9-volt battery-powered light-following robot that loves to chase flash light beams. These little robots are so quick, you have to run to keep up to them! We’ve even enhanced Herbiewith functional whisker and tail sensors, so he doesn’t get stuck in corners or under obstacles while chasing around. It doesn’t require a microcontroller or any programming and the kit comes with all the parts and documentation to get started.

LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Thinking Robots includes full building and programming instructions for two of Daniele Benedettelli’s most unique creations—a brand new version of his famous Rubik’s Cube solver and an interactive Tic-Tac-Toe playing robot.

Rules/Regulations/Fine Print:

• To enter the contest, you must comment on this post.
• Giveaway ends March 31st, at 12AM EST (9PM PST)
• One prize package per winner.
• No purchase is necessary to enter the contest – it’s free!
• Everyone is eligible, but shipping is free to only those in the Continental US – if you are outside this area, you will have to pay for shipping.
• PayPal is required to pay for shipping if you live out of the Continental US
• Winners will be contacted via email supplied in the comment form.
• You have 48 hrs to respond to the email and choose your prize package.
• GoRobotics.net makes NO WARRANTY or GUARANTEES about these prizes.
• GoRobotics.net can change the rules WHENEVER IT WANTS.

Special Thanks to Our Sponsors! BUY STUFF FROM THEM:

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Bots High is a work in progress documentary by Director Joey Daoud. The film documents the efforts of several high school combat robot teams leading up the Combat Robot National Championship. In order to hire a professional film team to cover the mayhem at the Championship, Daoud is looking to raise $9,000. He’s asking robot fans to chip in to support his effort. The funds will cover expenses as the film crew covers both the finals in Miami and in San Francisco, and interviews several luminaries in the BattleBot field, like Trey Roski and Greg Munson, creators of BattleBots.

The second [Championship] is the National BattleBots Championship in San Francisco, which is open to anyone who wants to build a robot. Some of the high school teams will take their chances and travel all the way across the country with their robot to compete in a 120 lb. open class and see if they can hold their own against professional robot builders.

Daoud’s goal is to produce a film that is, “entertaining to all yet motivating to kids and teenagers to see how fun and exciting match and science can be.” If you’d like to help out, visit the Bots High KickStarter page.

I think I’ve been rather fortunate that I’ve been able to meet a lot of interesting women in robotics, it’s kind of interesting that in the area of robotics more than other areas of computing I’ve dabbled in I actually found more women than the others. Now, this is entirely an anecdote based solely on my own experience. The article I found for today is what I’d call pretty darn awesome, because it means that we’re encouraging a whole lot more people to join the field. That’s roughly half our population that needs to see how fun robotics can be who will hopefully make new and exciting contributions.

FIRST is a high-school level robotics competition that Kat Struckman decided to try and inspire young women towards and in doing so she guided Team 1073 from Hollis/Brookline High School compete in the FIRST regionals. Two seniors from the highschool took it upon themselves to write up a plan to have more young women join the FIRST team in a Chariman’s Award letter. The plan details plans over three years to encourage more young women into robotics and hopefully related fields of science, engineering, technology, and math.

Kabel and Struckman came up with the idea of US FIRST Girls, which is a program dedicated to recruiting girls to join the FIRST Robotics program. Their plan included the design of a Web site and program to contact as many FIRST Robotics teams as possible.   In its third year, the Web site has had more than 125 teams join, including a team in Israel As a result of this effort, members of SWE, the Society of Women Engineers, are being recruited as mentors for current and future teams. – via The Nashua Telegraph

The movement is taking off enough that the organizers and enlisting mentors via the Society of Women Engineers. If you know high schoolers that you think would be interested, check out the US and Canadian FIRST websites for more information.