While the 1960s flashback motif clearly indicates that somebody has slipped something "unusual" into the Toyota punchbowl, these new vehicles (or personal mobility devices, as Toyota is calling them), are undeniably cool. There are also some new robots to go with the walking and rolling vehicles. I find myself wondering if this is going to tie into Toyota's visual vehicle guidance research.

UPDATE: Girlontheleft notes that the rolling mobility device looks strangely like this device, an anime assistant chair for the elderly (which of course runs amok and destroys tokyo). Sci-fi always seems to precede invention.

I was just installing the new Fedora Core 3 on my newest work server (way too many servers now BTW). Everything is going smoothly, and I am thinking that this is the best Redhat/Fedora ever. The only snag that I have run into so far is the lack of a wxPython rpm package. I installed the APT package manager, and then added all of the repositories I could find. Hint: (Install DAG's rpm repository once you have installed APT, then run apt-get update;apt-get upgrade a couple of times. Once this is done, DAG will have installed a TON of new RPM packages, and will have added new repositories).

An article in the New York Times (bugmenot login) about the RoboSapien is surprisingly detailed. Comprised mostly of information about the commercial process behind the toys (weighing in at 7 pages), it talks about WoWee, Tilden, and the prototyping process on the Robo Sapien.

I can't wait until Xmas is over and I can get one of these for cheap on eBay.

The AVRCam is an open source, AVR based camera which offers many of the same features as the CMU Cam. The AVRCam will let you download full frames, or track blobs in front of the camera. It uses the same OV6620 sensor used in the CMUCam, and offers QCIF (176x144) images from the CIF(352x288) sensor.

JRO has entered line following competition robots based on this sensor, and performed very well, taking second place at the last Chibots advanced line following competition.

THe AVRCam is available for sale now on

Core77.com is an industrial design resource website. It contains information about materials and their applications, and has interesting information building up in it's forums as well. I highly recommend browsing it's blog archives for cool news articles. While not strictly a robot related site, it is full of neat ideas, and is a great way to juice up your imagination. I also found Dynamic Materials in Core77's hopping busy forums. All in all, this site is a great resource.

I have been coding non-stop on a new theme for Army of Evil Robots. Helen was nice enough to create a new template idea (thanks hon!), and I have been slaving away getting it working.

I am also doing a lot of work on the Rant server (which is now actually this server). Unfortunately, last week, the original Rant server died for no apparent reason. Serendipitously, the server died the day after I had finished moving all of the old sites over to this server. Crazy eh? 410 days of uptime, and it dies one day after the most comprehensive backup ever. Later analysis brought the old server up with no problems, and I could never find out why it crashed.

I just finished milling out the new quadrature boards for the belligerator. These ones are able to be adjusted for clearance relative to the wheel (since the tolerances are not as tight as I was hoping).

Next up is the prototype version of the large logic board on the front of the bot.

Roland Piquepaille's blog, has a story about self navigating cars. Apparently there is a push to create cars that drive themselves. While robot controlled vehicles are clearly not ready for the mainstream, progress is being (rapidly) made. A timeline of 20-30 years does not seem too unrealistic.

Of course, other obstacles may prevent the automatically piloted car from ever seeing the market. Even if the robot vehicle is 100 times as safe as a human would be, and everybody switches to the new robot drivers, that still leaves (statistically) 500 deaths and innumerable injuries every year, which can be pinned directly on the designers of the control systems.

I just had to share this project. The Machine Project has created an unusual robot which can roam a convention floor with a radio-linked head mounted cockroach acting as the bio-computer that controls it.

There is a control schematic which looks to be fairly easy to build, and a page full of 5 megapixel promo photos, and an explanation of the project.

The roach looks uncomfortable.

Just saw this cool new project while I was browsing robots.net. Looks like somebody has built (thanks to a National Science Foundation grant) a Python robotics API. Pyro includes simulation of various mainstream robot chassis, as well as access to the gazebo 3d environment robot simulator.

The great thing here is that you can quickly simulate a robot, without writing a ton of C code up front. I have long preferred Python for quickly mocking up programs, but recently I have been finding that there is no real reason to go any further than the mockup. The Python programs are usually fast enough (and very easy to extend with a little bit of C if they are not), and avoid the usual buffer overflow, memory leak, and other misc C related debugging issues.