We are happy to announce that mini-competition are back. We are beginning with these 2 first event that are very popular at the robot games. Completions will happen on Saturday Mornings, at the Aerospace museum of Calgary.

August 28 – Mini-Sumo: beginner to master.

September25- Full size sumo – autonomous and  remote controlled.

Other competitions will be Announced and schedule later for October and so on.

Mini competitions are the  perfect opportunity to get started in robotic competition. So you can test your robot and settings to improve your level for the annual Robot Games.

-Competitors: Fees for the mini-sumo will be around 5$. please refer to WCRG 2010 rule book. Confirming your presence in advance would be appreciate, by emailing to:  info@mail.robotgames.com

http://www.festo.com/cms/de_de/5890.htm

In Google translated German:

Air is the element of AirJelly. The remote does not swim through water jellyfish AirJelly as AquaJelly, but literally glides through its central electric drive and an intelligent adaptive mechanism by the sea air. For AirJelly consists of a helium-filled ballonet.

As the only energy source used AirJelly two lithium-ion polymer batteries to which the central electric drive is connected. This transfers the force to a bevel gear and then successively to eight spur gears, which move about cranking the eight tentacles of the jellyfish. Each tentacle is as a structure with Fin Ray Effect® trained. The drive of a balloon by means of peristaltic motion is currently not in the history of aviation. AirJelly is the first indoor flying object with peristaltic drive. The jellyfish moves through this new drive concept based on the reaction principle of their propulsion, gently through the air.

There’s also an AirRay – a mechanical manta ray

From Facebook, via Wowee

And how true it is.

http://blog.beetlebum.de/2010/03/08/arduino/

I got this email recently, and I thought I would share it verbatim, as I don’t think I could capture his passion.

In recognition of the 20th anniversary of BEAM,  I will be announcing a new contest that will be sponsored in part by G-Prime.   No spoilers yet, however.  Read below and get tinkering though – news forthcoming!

Hello Mark,

Thank you for your reply. Sorry I haven’t been able to get back to you quickly, work has been taking up all my time lately. Anyway I thought I’d send you a few pictures of some bots I built with recycled materials and components. The first bot I ever built probably has the most recycled parts on it probably because I was a student at the time .

You can check out some pics on flickr and post them on your blog if you’d like.

You can also check out some of my youtube vids as well, if you want to see my Rocket pummer and Shadow guide robot in action (2 separate videos) .

Recently my colleague and friend, Chris, has started up a not-for-profit group (called United Greenworks) that recycles old consumer electronics and other materials. The main goal of the group is to reduce the amount of re-usable electronic/mechanical components & other building materials that are filling up our landfills or that are going to foreign countries as e-waste. The group has been very successful in Grande Prairie on a small scale thus far and as a result Chris (who is also a robot builder) and I (and others) have been salvaging an abundance of very useful motors, chips, solenoids, wires, connectors, sensors, power supplies and switches out of old PC’s, printers, audio equipment, and Photocopiers. Photocopiers are the holy grail for us robot guys, just one has everything you need to make a bunch of bots for years to come. We have 6 photocopiers coming to us and it seems like just the beginning.

Chris and I are both passionate about the environment, electronics, and building robots and would love to show people and share with people how to reuse old electronics for new projects such as robotics. We would also like to share some of the free parts we are accumulating with other robot enthusiasts. I myself am a big fan of BEAM bots and the whole junkbot/solar concept and would love to see a category at the Western Canadian Robot Games that incorporated this area of robotics.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration Mark! Oh and thanks for the Sparkfun Freeday post, it’s nice to see others frequent that blog, Chris and I aren’t the only ones.

Regards,

Jeremie (aka skater_j10)

Good little video, courtesy of Trossen.

http://bit.ly/7BPVkW

This video demonstrates learning by example in an artificial neural network that controls the motion of a mobile robot. The robot uses four sonar sensors and three IR sensors to detect the ranges to nearby objects. A wireless controller is used to initially remote control the robot past some test objects while the robot records the sensor readings and motor control signals. This data is then used to train a 2×7 artificial neural network (2 motors and 7 sensors). Once the network is trained, it is used to control the robot without intervention from the operator.