Hey loyal readers, I need your help. You may have noticed that things have been a bit quiet around here for a while – a long while, actually. The reason for this is that I’ve been working on another robotics project, and I need your help testing it out.  The project is a new robotics website called RobotBox. It’s a cross between a community website and portfolio for robot builders. RobotBox rose from the ashes of, the now defunct, Robot Directory, but is much much better.

RobotBox lets you showcase your robotic creations to the world. It’s designed to inspire new (and old) robot builders by giving them neat creations to check out. There are already quite a few robots on the site, and I’d love it if you added yours. Registration is super simple, and you can then upload your robot projects.

The site is still a work-in-progress, so here’s what I need from you – feedback! I want to know what you like, what you don’t like, and what features you want to see added. Basically I want to know if the site is useful, and what I can do to make it better.

You can leave comments below, use twitter, or email. Thanks!

It’s time to kick start our 10 Years of GoRobotics celebration! Our first giveaway features some great prizes from our sponsors, SuperDroid Robots, Apress, and Pololu. Entering this month’s contest will be simple. Here’s what you need to do: simply comment on this post and tell us your favorite robot. 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 JANUARY 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:

First Prize Package – Parallax Scribbler Robot – worth $99

The Scribbler Robot is a complete robotics platform designed for ages 8 and up. It comes with a full Parallax Basic Stamp 2 processor, many sensors, and intuitive software for getting started quickly. Perfect for beginners and intermediate builders.

Second Prize Package – Micro Maestro 6-channel USB Servo Controller + Practical Arduino Book (donated by Pololu and Apress) – worth $25 + $35

Pololu’s Micro Maestro 6-channel USB servo controller allows you to control six separate servos from your PC via USB, TTL serial from a microcontroller, and allows basic scripts to be executed on the controller itself. It also incorporates general I/O. This controller is one of the best controllers on the market, with 0.25us resolution with built-in speed and acceleration control.

Practical Arduino: Cool Projects for Open Source Hardware, by Jonathan Oxer and Hugh Blemings will tech you how to create your own Arduino-based designs, learn the arduino programming language, and will guide you through many practical projects from home automation to test equipment. This book is for hobbyists and developers interested in physical computing using a low-cost, easy-to-learn platform.

Third Prize Package – Remote Control Robot Construction Set (donated by SuperDroid Robots) – worth $46

The Tamiya Remote Control Robot Construction kit provides parts for wheeled remote control robot. Twin-motor gearbox, crank-axle gearbox, remote control box, ball caster, tires, universal arm, and other parts are included. The control box has 4 channels and enables control of 4 different movements by adding separately available gearboxes. It comes with instructions for building several different robots.

Keep reading for the complete rules, and TO ENER THE GIVEAWAY!

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Welcome to 2010 everyone! Thanks for making 2009 a great year for GoRobotics.net. We saw a 40% increase in visits from 2008, and more than doubled the number of subscribers to our RSS feed.  Below are the top news posts from 2009, along with some perennial favorites on the site.

2010 is a special year for us, as it marks the TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY of GoRobotics.net! Whooohooo! I’m super excited about this (and a little shocked). In April of 2000 I first bought the domain name ‘robotshop.com/gorobotics’ and moved the site there. Previously, it has been running under the name “robot central” on a free hosting provider. Time sure have changed!

To celebrate this HUGE milestone, we’ll be doing a series of giveaways leading up to April and the big finale! Not sure what’s it’s going to be yet … but it’s gonna be good. I’ll be posting the upcoming and current contests on the Ten Years of GoRobotics page.

Anyway, back to 2009. Here are our top posts from 2009 (in reverse order):

8. Fantastic Retro Robo-Art

7. Boeing’s Truck Mounted Laser Weapon Destroys Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

6. The Rise and Fall of Pleo, a Fairwell Lecture by John Sosoka, Former CTO of Ugobe

5. Battlestar Galactica Returns to Sing Its Final Song

4. Cornell Wins the 12th Annual Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition

3. Upcoming Biomass Powered Military Robot

2. US President Defending Against Robot Apocalypse

1. 10 Years of LEGO Mindstorms – Limited Edition Black NXT

and of course our perennail favorite articles:

• How to Crimp Connectors

• How to Build a Simple Robot – Beetle Robot

So, once again a HUGE THANKS to all of the faithful readers. I’m forever in your debt and I look forward to 2010 and the future!

Here’s a neat design by Nils Volker for a spherical rolling robot. The robot propels itself forward by turning about its axis, and can change the direction of motion by dynamically changing the axis of rotation. This seems to be a more efficient design than having a suspended pendulum which causes the sphereical robot to curve to one side or the other – a common design among other “ball” robots. Nils robot uses LEGO Mindstorms for electronics/mechanics and is remotely controlled via a bluetooth connection.

Nice work Nils!

More pictures/video after the jump.

[Via Robots Dreams]

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We’ve had a bumpy ride over the past few days. Looks like we got attacked by a trojan. Monitoring the server to see if it comes back.