The 2012 VEX Robotics World Championship is over and I've returned with hundreds of photos. This year's championship was held at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, CA. Last year, VEX cohosted several other events including BEST competitions, a Coast Guard robot contest, and a Boy Scount merit badge event. This year it was all VEX, all the time. The special guests were Nobel Prize winning physicist Dr. Douglas D. Osheroff, Dave Lavery of NASA, and Miral Kotb's dance troupe iLuminate. Read on for more photos and coverage of the event.

While the robot in this video appears to be entirely glove controlled, rather than autonomous, it does demonstrate that at least one Russian team is making progress towards dextrous manipulation.

Dale Dougherty, founder and general manager of Maker Media, publishers of MAKE Magazine and a division of O'Reilly Media, interviews Alasdair Allan, astrophysicist and author of Learning iPhone Programming: From Xcode to App Store, Programming iPhone Sensors, Basic Sensors in iOS: Programming the Accelerometer, Gyroscope, and More, Geolocation in iOS: Mobile Positioning and Mapping on iPhone and iPad, and iOS Sensor Apps with Arduino: Wiring the iPhone and iPad into the Internet of Things. The interview concentrates on the last of these books and the quickly evolving context within which it was written.

President Obama arrived in Boulder today, primarily to deliver a speech at the University of Colorado in support of extending the halving of student loan interest rates, currently due to expire July 1st. But before repairing to the Coors Events Center to deliver that speech, he made a quick visit to The Sink (locally famous because Robert Redford worked there while attending CU). The President made the rounds of those inside and then stepped outside to discover that a crowd had gathered around the restaurant. In that crowd was one of the team members from Orbotix, who had with him a Sphero robotic ball, which he demonstrated. He then turned the controller (iPhone?) over to President Obama, who tried it out for himself.

In the above video, posted by WillowGaragevideo, Adam Stambler, a student at Rutgers University, who spent last summer working at Willow Garage, explains how rosserial can help alleviate the need for writing new drivers from scratch when attaching new hardware or assembling a new machine.

The above video shows Tom Lauwers of Bird Brain Technologies unboxing their Hummingbird robotics kit, which appears to be quite close to being ready for market.

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems has announced the near-term availability of a trio of field retrofits for the Predator B (MQ-9 Reaper) Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS). Taken together, these enhancements increase the endurance of the Reaper from 27 to 42 hours, or, without the extended wings, from 27 to 37 hours. The upgrades consist of stronger landing gear, underwing fuel pods, and longer wings that take the wingspan to 88 feet. (via Danger Room)

At last week's Sea-Air-Space Exposition, sponsored by the Navy League, General Dynamics showed it's Knifefish Surface Mine Countermeasure Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (SMCM UUV), intended to be incorporated into the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) mine countermeasures mission package. The 20 ft., 3000 pound submersible will prowl for 16 hours at a time, to detect and identify mines in high-clutter underwater environments without putting sailors in harm’s way, including mines that are suspended in the ocean, resting on the sea floor or buried. The Knifefish will help alleviate what's seen as a deficiency in the LCS's collection of capabilities. UUVs have been integral to the Navy's planning process for some time, as evidenced by the now declassified 2004 report The Navy Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (UUV) Master Plan.

In Robots Podcast #102 (April 20th, 2012), continuing with interviews recorded in February at SCHUNK ExpertDays, Amanda talks with Steve Cousins, CEO of Willow Garage, and Roland Siegwart, Vice President of Research and Corporate Relations and director of the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zurich. Both talk about the challenges of going to market with the products of research.

Read On or Tune In

If you are even remotely interested in robotics you should be aware of the new DARPA Robotics Challenge competition that aims to push the boundaries of rescue robots and especially humanoids.
Davide Faconti and Icarus Technology are setting up a team in order to compete at the top-level “Track A” part of the competition where the participants create both the software and the hardware platform for the challenge. The task is quite ambitious but the team is very experienced having already a range of operational humanoid robots.
Also an interesting aspect is the goal to make both the software and the hardware open source.
Currently there is an open call for participation towards everyone with the skills to be a part of such a project. It is a great opportunity for roboticist to participate at DARPA’s Robotics Challenge! You can find more information here

Q.bo learning to recognize his own reflection.

Festo has just released a set of videos covering manipulators, an active aerial sculpture composed of helium-filled tetrahedrons (above video), a game partially controlled by electrodes on the scalp, and a set of musical instruments that use mechanically operated strings to drive synthetic voices. The manipulators include one which gets its gripping force from nano features, modeled on the feet of Geckos, one modeled on and functioning much like the trunk of an elephant, two that get their motive force from fluidic muscles, and one which is hand-like, air-operated, and controlled by a glove.

This is the Mobot, a low cost modular robot made by Barobo. Every module has wheels at each end and two hinges at its center. It can be combined with others easily with a simple snap connector and it can be programmed and configured with a graphic UI or directly with C/C++. The modules can perform complicated tasks, like walking, crawling, grabbing objects and more. They are available for pre-order and they will cost $270 each.
Barobo is a company founded by Harry Cheng, professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC Davis and his former graduate student, Graham Ryland, in 2011. They developed the technology and patents for this project which is now licensed to Barobo by the University. The company recently received a National Science Foundation small business innovation research Phase I grant of $150,000. You can find more information at Flexibility Envelope, UC Davis and of course Barobo.com .

(Via Hizook) Dr. Carrick Detweiler, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and co-director of the NIMBUS Lab, has provided Hizook with advance access to a paper titled Resonant Wireless Power Transfer to Ground Sensors from a UAV and the above video, to be present next month at ICRA 2012. Travis Deyle of Hizook works with wirelessly-powered sensors at his day job and has previously published an article on wirelessly powering robot swarms.

If you believe that machines are destined to become our overlords, this is likely to send a chill up your spine.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have radically shrunk the size and cost of neutron generators, opening the possibility of many new applications. The new design is flat, like a computer chip, and occupies so little space that it may be used as an implant, in cancer therapy.

Among the many topics discussed at the European Robotics Forum 2012, was the application of robotics technology to agriculture. In a press release posted on the European Robotics Technology Platform website, Prof. Simon Blackmore, head of Engineering at Harper Adams University College is quoted as saying

We’ve started with a clean sheet of paper. We’re re-evaluating the whole approach to agriculture. At the moment, crops are drilled in straight rows to suit machines, but what if they were drilled to follow the contours of the land, or to take account of the micro level environmental conditions within a portion of a field? The potential boost to production we could generate if harvests were staggered to suit the crop rather than mechanisation is immense. We’re talking about micro tillage, mechanical weeding and planting using small, smart, autonomous, modular machines.

DARPA has issued a Sole Source Intent Notice for humanoid robot systems for their Robotics Challenge Program. The contract is to go to Boston Dynamics, who will produce a set of eight identical humanoid robots based upon the PETMAN and Atlas projects they have already undertaken with DARPA support (see above video). These robots will be supplied to software teams competing for the Challenge prize. Automaton provides additional detail.

Do you like your chocolate shaped into 3D forms? If so you're in luck. A 3D printer for chocolate, developed at the University of Exeter, has gone on sale. Create your own chocolate castles! Next question, does it work with white chocolate?

The above video is the third in a series demonstrating the MorpHex morphing ball robot by Kåre Halvorsen (aka Zenta), whose day job is as a consultant engineer at the Assistive Technology Centre for Rogaland (a part of the Norwegian Welfare Services). As with his earlier, ant-like project, the A-Pod, which is available from Lynxmotion as a kit, the MorpHex has many degrees of freedom and moves more like an organism than most robots. More videos of Zenta's work are available on YouTube.