Podcast: At the FIRST Robotics Championship, one defending champion team learns engineering-and life-lessons

Blog Post: This little robot developed at UC Berkeley's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab can survive a 7-story fall -- and dash off at high-speed.

Video: Toast your successful project with a drink that the project mixes itself

Blog Post: There's a new challenge, called MoonBots, that anyone can participate in. Announced this week, the contest asks six-member teams of children and adults to design a LEGO Mindstorms robot suitable for the moon.

Blog Post: Using glider AUV technology, researchers at Rutgers University hope to be the first scientists to successfully navigate an AUV across the entire Atlantic Ocean over the course of seven months. Ari Daniel Shapiro reports on the project in an excellent Spectrum podcast, explaining the technology behind the glider and what the goals of the mission are. Gliders use low-power variable buoyancy systems to glide up and down through the water column for months at a time and carry payloads of different kinds of sensors to collect oceanographic data. These are primarily water quality sensors -- salinity, temperature, optical quality, …

Blog Post: I am a confessed Roomba evangelist. One of the most frequent questions I get is how Roomba knows where to go -- does it build a map? Does it do rows of your carpet? Why is it spinning in circles? Since I'm friends with a few past and current Roomba engineers, I've always known that Roomba is mostly random. It does have a few behaviors -- for example, wall-following, or the spiral pattern it uses when it starts up or when it's in "dirt detect" mode -- but mostly, it wanders, as anyone who's spent time watching their Roomba with …

Blog Post: A robot penguin and its 3D Fin Ray® structure. Source: Festo Following up on a previous post, Festo's latest creation deserves a closer look. To start with the obvious: Why robot penguins? Penguins are amazingly efficient swimmers: According to tests by Festo's engineers, their body shape shows a flow resistance 20 to 30% lower than the hydro-dynamically most favorable known technical bodies. If penguins were to run on gas, their energy efficiency would allow them to swim 1,500 kilometers through icy Antarctic waters - on just one liter (0.26 US gallons) of fuel! Festo's …

Blog Post: Happy Friday, everyone! There's really nothing insightful or informative about this post, other than some robot video amusement for your afternoon. Our first video is from the group Flight of the Conchords, who have created a song that describes life after the coming robot Armageddon. Personally I'm prepared to welcome my new robot overlords, thanks to my Old Glory Robot Insurance, but it's interesting to see the situation from the robots' side. Be sure to watch through the end for the binary solo.

Blog Post: Among the attractions at RoboBusiness last week was Keepon, a little yellow puffball robot. I had the opportunity to speak with Marek Michalowski, one of Keepon's developers, about the robot's place in autism therapy and its totally sweet dance moves. Keepon, originally developed by Hideki Kozima, is a "BeatBot." The little robot was made famous by a Wired music video showing it dancing -- and indeed, a lot of Michalowski's work has involved teaching Keepon to respond to musical beats. But believe it or not, Keepon was actually originally developed for autism therapy. It's a relatively …

Blog Post: Boston Dynamics, makers of our beloved BigDog robot, have just announced their newest project: to build a bipedal humanoid robot called PETMAN. As part of a $26.3M Army contract, the Protection Ensemble Test Mannequin will be "the first anthropomorphic robot that moves dynamically like a real person.â¿¿

A rendering of PETMAN in its test chamber. Image courtesy Boston Dynamics.