Robots Blog

Happy New Year from Robots Dreams!

We’ve all been waiting for domestic robots to become a reality, probably as long as we’ve been waiting for personal jet-packs to revolutionize our daily commute. Ellie Rountree, from Rocketboom, takes a look at the evolution of home robots from the early 1980’s until 2009, and wonders how much longer we might have to wait before Rosie, the Jetsons’ robotic maid relieves us of domestic drudgery.

The latest generation of micromouse robots are lightening fast, so fast that it’s actually hard for camera people to track them. The video clips below were captured during practice sessions for the 30th All Japan Micromouse Competition by Peter Harrison (Decimous) using a Casio FC100 camera set for 640x480 at 210 fps. While the high video frame rate effectively slows down the robots speed by a factor of 7X, the...

The slogan of ROBO-ONE from the very beginning has been “Humanoid Robot Entertainment”, and we have to admit that some of the stunts that occur during the competitions, whether planned or by accident, turn out to be totally hilarious. It’s also well known that the ROBO-ONE name itself is word play on K-1 wrestling, a very popular “sport” here. So it was no surprise when the ROBO-ONE Gran Prix competition...

To the untrained eye, Motohiro Nakamura’s latest humanoid robot creation, JO-ZERO, may look just like any other biped robot kit, but once it starts moving the differences are startling. Nakamura, a long time ROBO-ONE champion, founder of Himeji Soft Works, and father of the WR-07 transformer robot that captured attention world-wide and logged over 6.5 million views on YouTube, has definitely given birth to a new star in the world...

a Originally uploaded by MITAuvLab Believe it or not, the body and wheels on this little robot are made with gingerbread with frosting for glue. Pretty cool. :D

IMG_2591 Originally uploaded by Robots-Dreams. Robot soccer, especially KondoCup Robot Soccer, just keeps getting better and better. We spent Sunday watching the 18th competition at the RoboSpot facility in Akihabara, and were really impressed by how fast, flexible, and accurate many of the top robot players have become. The game has become very lifelike, and exciting, to say the least. Check out our KondoCup Robot Soccer photoset, and you'll see...

It’s been obvious for the past several ROBO-ONE competitions that the percentage of newcomers had really dropped off, probably due to the fact that the ROBO-ONE committee has consistently raised the performance level of the competitions. To turn that trend around, inject some new energy and enthusiasum, and to bring in a lot of new builders, the committee has announced the ROBO-ONE Light competition, a subset of the full-on ROBO-ONE...

Hinamitetu’s robot gymnast is getting better and better, but still needs a lot of work on its horizontal bar dismount before the Robot Olympics qualifying meets start in the Spring.

Christmas EVE Originally uploaded by tim.perdue.