via MAKE: Blog: Maker Workshop – Miniature Robots on Make: television.

John Park builds some lively and inexpensive miniature robots. Starting with a simple vibrabot made from a scrub brush, John assembles a solar junkbot and a slightly more complex beetlebot, which has paper clip ‘feelers’ attached to switches that allow it to respond to its environment. All it takes are a few common electronic components and some everyday objects and you can make an entertaining robot all your own.

You have to love any group that builds robots to compete at something, anything. Without the competition, you just have someone’s hobby and even the mildest, blandest product is acceptable, because – well – what’s better and why? Have a ring and rules ala Thunderdome, (Two may enter, one may leave) and you have ambition and desire to climb the ranks.

From Robots Dreams:

The first rule of human “Fight Club” is “You don’t talk about Fight Club”. The first rule of Robot “Fight Club”, at least the way it’s played here, is “You must have as much fun as possible”.
On Wednesday, February 11, at a secret underground location, a group of friends and devoted robot fanatics gathered compete in one of the most exciting, surprising, and towards the end hilariously funny, Robot “Fight Club” sessions we’ve ever seen. The competition loosely follows the ‘Pro-Resu’ (Pro-Wrestling) format used by carbon based life forms, but any similarity to real life is purely accidental.

Via Robots.net:

At the recent RSSC Mini Sumo competition, spectators watched as robots pushed each other around until the three winners were determined. We all know the classic Mini-Sumo rules. Two robots go into a 30 inch ring and try to push each other out. The last robot in the ring wins. What we found more interesting was the video of what happened afterwards when they decided to toss eleven robots into the Sumo ring at once. After lots of chaotic pushing and shoving, a single NXT tracked robot is left standing in the ring.

Not sure how exactly I came to miss this, but the newest Arduino IDE is out.

Version 0013

Windows, Linux (32 Bit), Mac

Biggest bonuses:

- Printing Floats

- Reduced Sketch size by not including unused functions

- Support for ATMega328, which is basically a 168 with double space.

From the release notes:

0013 - 2009.02.06

[documentation / examples]
* Adding examples for Parallax Ping Sensor and Memsic 2125 accelerometer.

[core / libraries]
* Adding support for printing floats to Print class (meaning that it works
  in the Serial, Ethernet, and LiquidCrystal classes too).  Includes two
  decimal places.
* Added word, word(), bitRead(), bitWrite(), bitSet(), bitClear(), bit(),
  lowByte(), and highByte(); see reference for details.
* Working around problem that caused PWM output on pins 5 and 6 to never go
  to 0 (causing, for example, an LED to continue to glow faintly).
* Removing cast macros, since function-style casts are a feature of C++.  This
  should fix contributed libraries that broke in Arduino 0012.
* Modifying pulseIn() to wait for a transition to start timing (i.e. ignoring
  any pulse that had already started when the function was called).
* Fixing bug in random() that limited the ranges of values generated.  Thanks
  to Mikal Hart.
* Modifying delay() to pause for at least the given number of milliseconds.
* Fixing bug in Ethernet library that interfered with use of pins 8 and 9.
* Originating each outgoing network connection from a different port (in the
  Client class of the Ethernet library).  Thanks to Paul and joquer.
* Updating ATmega168 bootloader to work with standard distributions of avrdude
  (responding to signature requests made with the universal SPI command) and
  correctly store EEPROM data.  Thanks to ladyada.
* Adding support for the ATmega328.  The upload speed is 57600 baud, so you
  may need to edit boards.txt or reburn your bootloader if you bought an
  ATmega328 w/ bootloader from adafruit or other supplier.

[environment]
* Omitting unused functions from compiled sketches, reducing their size.
* Changing compilation process to allow for use of EEMEM directive (although
  not yet uploading EEPROM data).

With the upcoming robot games, I thought I would show off some of the masters level work in the field.

Jon Hylands‘ Blog has a couple of videos from the 2007 Eastern Canada competition.  Fascinating stuff, I was very impressed at the build quality, although I think Jon could have thrown in some hot glue pinstriping for the do it yourselfers out there

Check It out,

Dj Sures (The Local Wall-E Guy) is making some news. (Go Calgary!)

http://forums.trossenrobotics.com/showthread.php?t=2486

Robots.net has a quick write up here:

http://robots.net/article/2752.html