The RoboBuilder robotics kits from a Korean company of the same name (or is it IRobou?) is now available for purchase from Trossen Robotics. The kits, which are similar to the Bioloid robotics kits from Robotis, employ modular components, like motors and sensors, to allow builders to quickly create a wide variety of robotic creations. RoboBuilder touts features such as metal ball bearings, PID motor control for precise motion, and reverse/over voltage protection. The kits also come with distance and sound sensors.

The basic RoboBuilder kit starts at $420 and goes all the way up to $1,500 for the Expert kit. Have any of our readers played with the kits yet? Let us know how they are by leaving a comment.

You can check out a video of the RoboBuilder humanoid model after the break.

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The Tech Shop in Menlo Park, CA is offering a class on how to build a 60-pound combat robot.

Here is your chance to build your own fire-spewing, buzz-saw wielding combat robot with the help and guidance of veteran combat robot builders!

In this 2-day full-weekend class, you and your team member will learn to create a 60-pound fighting robot platform with help from the world’s best combat robot builders.

The $595 registration fee allows two team members to attend and a $995 materials fee covers supplies for creating your own machine of mass destruction.

Everyone needs a little LEGO love, every now-and-then, so here’s some nice robots built by Jas Nagra.

[Via Brothers Brick]

At the 18th annual International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC), Georgia Tech came away as the winner, with prize money of $27,000. The event, which was held on July 28th - Aug. 1st, 2008, marked the conclusion of the 4th Mission of the IARC, with a new mission being released for the 2009 competition. The competition, which as been existance since 1991 (the creator of the competition, Robert Michelson, coined the term ‘Aerial Robotics’), and has long been known as a grueling, and nearly impossible, robotics competition.

The forth mission was divided into 4 different levels - a 3km ingress path, locating a specific building in a town environment, flying into, or launching a sensor into, the building and sending back pictures, and finally doing all three steps in under 15 minutes. Several teams were able to complete 3 of the first 4 steps, but no team was able to complete all the steps in under 15 minutes, the “winner take all” requirement. The judges divided the total prize winnings of $80,000 USD between 10 teams, with Georgia Tech taking the most money.

The new 2009 competition will be announced soon. Based on previous competitions, it will be interesting to see the level of difficulty that the new 5th mission will require.

For those of you that just can’t get enough robot news, you should definitely check out the Robots Podcast. The show is now produced in part by Markus Waible, of Talking Robots fame, who kindly sent us a note letting us know about the show. Markus also writes for the IEEE Automaton blog, which is on our feedlist, and another great news resource.

The most recent episode of the Robots Podcast features Steven Rainwater from robots.net and Mikell Taylor with the Automaton blog and Bluefin Robotics, a maker of AUVs and a competitor to iRobot. They discuss the online robotics community, blogging about robots, and life at Bluefin. Steven, if you’re reading this, I do have one nit to pick - GoRobotics.net actually started before robots.net, but we’ll overlook the slip.

A new Robots Podcast is released every two weeks, with the next episode slated to appear on August 15th. In the meantime, you can go and check out the four previous episodes. The site also has a growing robotics forum you can check out.

The DelFly Micro, built by Delft University of Technology, is the world’s smallest ornithopther. The flapping robot has a 10 cm wingspan and even includes a video camera. In a mere year-and-a-half, the team decreased the weight from the 16 grams of the DelFly II, to the amazing 3 grams of the DelFly Micro.

The group hopes to use the ornithopther to study the aerodynamics of small flapping vehicles, as computer simulations prove very difficult. They also hope to use the onboard camera to achieve autonomous flight using machine vision. The current vehicle has a 30mAh lithium polymer battery that allows for 3 minutes of flight-time (the battery is 1/3 of the DelFly’s weight). The wings are made of mylar and flap at 30 Hz.

You can see some video of the ornithopther flying after the jump.

Update: The August 15th edition (MP3) of the Robots Podcast features an interview with the creators of the DelFly Micro.

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The Onion once again lays on some robot funnies. Previously they took on the question, are we giving the robots that run our society too much power? See the latest below.

Chris Anderson, over at DIY Drones, recently posted a full page advertisement, from the July edition of the AUVSI magazine, for AUS International’s AirSniper product. The AirSniper is described as, “a VTOL combat mini UAV intended for close infantry support.” Or, in other words, “a gun with wings.”

Now, this idea seems like a solid one – why not mount weapons on UAVs? In fact, it’s been done before. However, I don’t think anyone has every proposed a UAV sniper system that can also be torn-down to work as a regular, old, gun. Also, AUS claims,

Our patent pending “tilt and stop” rotor design concept gives AirSniper hovering performance and agility of helicopters, with speed and endurance of fixed wing airplanes.

Supposedly the airframe also allows for “precise aiming at any flight speed.” Quite a claim. The comedic aspects of the advertisement give some reason to doubt as to AUS International’s ability to bring this to market. Chris even said, “if this were the April edition, I’d think it was an April Fool’s joke”.

Some of the more laughable lines from the ad:

For an enemy up there, you could be like a sitting duck.
With AirSniper, sitting duck is the other guy.

WIRED’s DangerRoom blog also got into the action with their latest idea, the AirKnife.

Ok, so after AUS International had been give such a bad rap, what did I do? Well, I contacted them to find out what the skinny was. Check out our correspondance after the jump. (more…)

Pictured above is a group photo of all the teams competing in the 11th annual International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle competition. University of Maryland won the competition, unseating University of Florida from their 3 year winning streak. Congratulations to all the teams. The final standings for the top 8 teams are below. Pictured below is Maryland’s vehicle and a team photo.

Final Standings:

1. University of Maryland
2. University of Texas at Dallas
3. École de technologie supérieure
4. University of Florida
5. United States Naval Academy
6. University of Victoria
7. Cornell
8. Florida Atlantic University

Don’t forget that the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International’s 11th Annual International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition is taking place this weekend in San Diego, CA.

This year’s theme is “Underseas 11″ and will feature gambling themed tasks, such as grabbing a sack of cash from a “bank vault”, traversing an “air duct” (a floating PCV structure), and the like.

The competition is open to the public this Saturday and Sunday and is held at the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR) Systems Center’s Transducer Evaluation Center (TRANSDEC) pool located on Point Loma, San Diego. You can read the spectator FAQ (PDF) for more details.

25 teams from around the glob are registered for the competition, including my alma mater, NC State University. The teams have to construct a fully autonomous underwater vehicle that is capable of navigating, using machine vision, and acoustic navigation. It should be interesting (the competition is rather boring, since it’s underwater, but talking to the teams is fun). So, if you’re in the area, please go out and cheer them on. Send me some pictures if you do.

Update: The team from Cornell appears to be live-blogging the event.

Update 2: You can watch a live webcast of the finals here. It looks like the underwater video is being shot with an LBV from Seabotix.

Update 3: Here’s a list of the teams going into the finals.

Update 4: You can see the final standings here. Surprise ending!

Boeing has announced that they will be purchasing Insitu Inc., which is a major player in the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) market. The two companies have a prior history of working together from as early as 2002, on the ScanEagle project. Insitu is projected to have revenue of $150 million USD this year, which is up 70% from last year. Insitu also makes the Integrator, GeoRanger, and Insight UAV systems. The purchase price has not been disclosed. Insitu will operate as a seperate subsidiary of Boeing. Insitu is based in Bingen, Washington and currently has 360 employees.

This will most definitely not be the last of such acquisitions. As the UAV market grows, be on the lookout for much larger aerospace companies like Northrop Gumman and Lockheed, to buy up all the smaller companies.

This site should be fully transitioned from Joomla to Wordpress. If you find any lingering problems, send me an email or message me on Twitter. I’m also still looking for a theme designer, as the current theme is a bit piecemeal.

Thanks again everyone for your patience and continued support. You rock!

LEGO has recently come out with a new linear actuator piece as part of their new Power Function sets. The new actuators have a movement range of 5 studs, or about 1.6 in (4cm), which correspond to 26 full revolutions of the input shaft. The actuators also have a built in clutch mechanism to prevent damage from over-extension. Klocki has more pictures of the actuators. This may be a useful alternative to much more expensive linear actuators, like the ones from Firgelli.

MIT’s OpenCourseware page is an excellent resource for learning some high level topics in many fields. The school has placed many of their course materials online, and freely available to the public. There is quite a few courses listed in the engineering category. Just today I saw that they’ve posted course material for the 6.867 Machine Learning class online. They’ve listed lecture notes, assignments, projects, and exams.

The course will give the student the basic ideas and intuition behind modern machine learning methods as well as a bit more formal understanding of how, why, and when they work. The underlying theme in the course is statistical inference as it provides the foundation for most of the methods covered.

There are also notes for Machine Vision and Cognitive Robotics classes online.

Thorn, over at Robot Stock News, recently stumbled upon some very interesting patent filings from iRobot that may be a new lawnmower. The 84 page filing has several potential designs for robotic lawnmowers listed - electric, gasoline, Roomba-like, different cutting systems, navigation systems, etc.

Apparently iRobot is considering several different barrier systems, including the standard “electric fence” type system, and a more exotic solar-powered boundary marker system. Also being considered is the use of GPS, “lawn learning” capabilites, clipping collection, and more.

The arrival of a robotic lawnmower (Mowba? Lawnba? Mowr?) has long been rumored, but this news definitely pushes the possibility into the “highly likely” category. One key question is what will the price point be?

Robot Stock News has more details. You can also read the full patent filing online here.