Category Archives: Robotics

Meet Joe Willis

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Described by Jay Ingram as the “most remarkable young maker” that he has EVER seen, we are proud to introduce Joe Willis: Beakerhead’s much adored and hyper-talented youth ambassador.

 

L: What are you making/ building these days?

J: I have so many projects on the go that I don’t know where to start. The list of completed projects is much, much shorter. When it came time to prepare for CYSF 2013 I sadly couldn’t include everything that I had prepared. It was tough to cut some things out. Even then my trifold board was barely visible behind all the stuff I wanted to exhibit. When I go to places like Western Canada Robot Society (WCRS) or the Botzone, I am like a pinball, bouncing around learning about what other people are up to and it all sounds good to me.

Calling all Robo-teers

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We’d like to invite all competitors to join us for the 20th Annual Western Canadian Robot Games!

May 11, 2013 at the Calgary Aero Space Museum. This year we have some exciting new demo events involving UAVs (Quadcopters) and hacked Roombas. We’ll also have some special guests from the hit TV series: Canada’s Greatest Know-it-all and even Jay Ingram,  who will be handing out awards!

Bring your family as well; the day will be filled with robot action.

Watch ‘Canada’s Greatest Know-it-all’ contestants complete in a robot challenge to see who can come up with the best creation in a limited amount of time. We’ll have food from Calgary food trucks available on location, chances to win door prizes (like a GoPro Hero 3 camera), and our uniquely created Offroadbot Challenge is back again this year!

Come check out the action!

We’ll also be giving away a GoPro Hero 3 to a randomly drawn competitor; by preregistering your robot(s) for an event before May 10, 2013 you will be eligible to win!

For those wanting to spend the night at a nearby hotel, we were able to get a $91/night rate at the Calgary Airport Travel lodge, When making your reservation just mention that you are a Western Canadian Robot Games Competitor. If you’d like to stay across the street from the venue there is the Best Western Plus Port O’call but unfortunately we weren’t able to get a discount there.
Keep up-to-date with ongoing news and info leading up to the games by following us on Twitter and Facebook.

We hope to see you at the Games!

Maker Faire 2012

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Maker Faire was a great success for its inaugural run here in Calgary.

Thanks to all who could come out and enjoy it!

Faby Martin has done her usual amazing work photographing the event.

Check out her pictures of the 2012 Calgary Mini Maker Faire!

Next year is going to be even bigger so start your projects today!

Special thanks to Don Greer, as well as Gina and Jason Nenniger for all their hard work.  We figure over 120 people took part in our “Learn to Solder” workshop, which was sponsored in part by Make: Magazine.

I’d also like to thank Dave Levesque and his girlfriend for coming by and showing off WCRS to the public.

As a final thank-you, we have to recognize Westjet for their fantastic contribution to the WCRS.  We will announce the winner of the draw shortly, which was made possible from their ‘WestJetters Caring for our Community‘ program.  Thanks to Shannon Hoover and Don Greer for making this happen.

I had a fantastic day and can’t wait for next year’s event!

Fundamental Law of High Speed Flying Maneuverability Discovered

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For those interested in the theory that goes into the practice, here is an article discussing the limits on [flying] maneuverability in cluttered envrionments. Inspired by abilities of birds, but ‘simple’ enough to soon be available for use in UAVs.

Fundamental Law of High Speed Flying Maneuverability Discovered

Google I/O 2011: Cloud Robotics

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This is last years information, but I ran accros a reference, and do not remember seeing anything about it here. 40 minute video. Would be fun to have one of those PR2 robots to play with!

Google I/O 2011: Cloud Robotics

The talk mentioned being able to use ROS with Arduino, so I looking up this information:

ARM and ROS

Not enough to be able to build a complete bot running ROS on an Arduino, but enough to make it easy to use Arduino as part of a bigger system using ROS. A much more complete implementation will run on Andriod [in Java].

Ted Talk, Robots that Fly and Cooperate

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This 16:47 video includes many clips of quadracopters that have been posted here before, being talked about by a researcher from University of Pennsylvania researcher.  The final ‘music video’ clip, I have not seen before.

Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly … and cooperate

Thanks to Gina for pointing this Ted Talk out to me.

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Phil