If Presidents, Veterens, and Laborors get only a day, what do we give robotics? How about a whole week! That’s right, National Robotics Week has been announced and is slated for April 10-18, 2010.  The event is headed up by iRobot, along with a whole slew of robotics companies and organizations.

During National Robotics Week, a week-long series of events and activities is aimed at increasing public awareness of the growing importance of “robo-technology” and the tremendous social and cultural impact that it will have on the future of the United States.

Sounds pretty sweet. The stated goals are to:

• Celebrate the US as a leader in robotics technology (because we’re falling behind).
• Educate the public about the ongoing social and cultural impact of robotics technology (let’s avoid robomageddon).
• Advocate for increased funding for robotics technology research and development (well, at least their being honest. It’s not like most of iRobot’s funding doesn’t come from this).
• Inspire students of all ages to pursue careers in robotics and other science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) related fields (see the first bullet point).

So, what do you think? Is National Robotics Week worthwhile?

As we say goodbye to the 200x’s and welcome the 201x’s it’s good to pause a bit and think about the world as it was ten years ago. There was no Wikipedia, no YouTube, internet access was still dialup for a huge portion of the population, and we didn’t have a whole heap of really cool robots. To highlight some of the great inventions of the past ten years, we’ve selected 10 of the best robots fom the past 10 years.

With any sort of list like this, things are pretty arbitrary, but we tried to pick robots that have made an impact in our culture or have impacted the hobby or science of robots in a major way. Below you’ll find 10 amazing robots from the military, toy industry, consumer industry, and science community that have had a lasting impact on robotics.

Take a look and tell us what you think. If you had to nominate 10 robots of the decade, who would they be? Keep reading for our picks for robots of the decade.

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I’m not quite sure what to make of this, but iRobot just posted a music video to their YouTube channel featuring the music of Lansdown and lots of footage of Packbots blowing up things. See it below:

Jon Stewart and his crew tackle the difficult ethical questions of involving robots in war. Hidden behind the humor, there’s some decent points.

[Via The Robot Report]

Shown below is a video of a robot that uses the perceived vanishing point of an image to navigate through a corridor. The robot, based on an iRobot Create, uses a standard webcam and video processing to locate the vanishing point of what it sees, and navigates towards that point. Such navigation works very well in office-like environments with straight walls, windows, and ceilings. The robot also uses visual clues, like orange traffic cones, to recognize specific locations.

I was responsible for vision-based navigation of the robot within the hallways. I used the vanishing points from the parallel lines present indoors to compute the robot heading. This was then fed into a controller to control the direction of the robot for navigation. The computation was made robust to change in light conditions, false detections, occlusions by a layered filtering approach that included RANSAC and least squares filtering among others.

Such navigation has some very interesting implications for simple navigation through common environments (houses, offices, shopping malls, etc.). Has anyone tried this using RoboRealm? You can read the project report (PDF) here.

[Via Hackzine]