/ keaggy.com :: RobotPirateMonkey /

Right after I posted that last link I realized that I don’t really feel the desire to keep this linkblog going — at least not in the same way. But I’ve got an idea to continue RPM so I’m going to work on that (I hope). It’s a book — or maybe a blog — called 100RPM, or “The 100 Greatest Robots, Pirates and Monkeys That Ever Lived, Died, or Didn’t Live.” Or something like that. Quick bios on the best of the best. Here’s a sample I whipped up:

100RPM might be looking for a publisher. Here’s my Amazon author page and here are my two previous books:
• Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found
• 50 Sad Chairs

So see ya later keaggy.com/rpm. Posting here had slowed down so much that this page is basically shuttered anyway. It’s been a good nine years, though. Cheers.

— Bill

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“DID YOU KNOW : THIS WEB SITE IS USED TO IDENTIFY, RECORD AND RETAIN INFORMATION ON ROBOTS

• THIS IS A ROBOT HOBBYIST WEB SITE I/WE DO NOT BUY AND/OR SELL ANYTHING ON THIS SITE.
• WHAT YOU GET IS INFORMATION AND PICTURES THAT WILL HELP YOU IDENTIFY ROBOTS AND THEIR BOXES, CONTROLLERS AND ITEMS THAT PERTAIN TO ROBOTS.
• I/WE DO NOT BUY OR SELL ROBOTS, MANUALS, CONTROLLERS ETC.. I/WE DO NOT BUY OR SELL ANYTHING ON THIS SITE. YOU GET LINKS TO COMPANIES THAT BUY AND SELL ROBOTS AND TOYS.
• YOU GET FILES THAT YOU CANNOT GET ANYWHERE TO HELP YOU, YOU GET INFORMATION OF WHERE TO GET THOSE ITEMS.
• I/WE DO NOT FIND PARTS FOR OTHERS. YOU GET LINKS TO CHAT ROOMS THAT CAN HELP YOU.
• YOU GET INFORMATION ON HOW TO REPAIR YOUR ROBOTS.
• I/WE DO NOT REPAIR ROBOTS. YOU GET LINKS TO OTHERS THAT DO REPAIRS.
• THERE IS NO WARRANTIES EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.”

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Check out this gentle, sushi-grabbing robot.

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Heh. “Junkbot sculptor Lockwasher strikes again (strikes back?).”

Beer2′s technical specs:
Head – 1945 chrome BLC utility light shell.
Eye – vintage movie camera lens w/adjustable spring-loaded aluminum casing.
Body – 4.7 liter “adult soda” mini-keg.
Legs – propane tank valve handles, brass spacers, drilled-out washers, pair of aluminum Lady Josephine shoe butler (wall-mounted shoe shine holders).
Feet/base – 3 mini bread loaf pans, lamp hardware and a 1/2″ precision drilled aluminum base plate.
+assorted nuts, bolts, screws and, of course – lockwashers!

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“Robotic systems continue to evolve, slowly penetrating many areas of our lives, from manufacturing, medicine and remote exploration to entertainment, security and personal assistance. Developers in Japan are currently building robots to assist the elderly, while NASA develops the next generation of space explorers, and artists are exploring new avenues of entertainment. Collected here are a handful of images of our recent robotic past, and perhaps a glimpse into the near future.”

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Wow, they managed to use the work “robot” 11 times in the opening paragraph.

Robot innovation continued its relentless advances during 2008. In this post we would like to showcase some of our favorite robots and robot videos of the last year or so. This review is heavily slanted to consumer robots and research robots. Perhaps in the future we can do a review of industrial robots. Given the sheer number of robots that are out there we know there will be several excellent robots that we have overlooked in this review. If you know of any really awesome robots or robot videos that we have missed please let us know and we will consider adding them to this post. So without further delay, lets take a look at some of the best robots and robot videos of 2008

PS: Yay. WordPress 2.7.1 broke my shitty custom RPM theme. I changed it to a generic one for now.

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build a ROBOT cupcakes!

Originally uploaded by hello naomi

hello naomi posts “i finally made robot cupcakes! they’ve been on my to-do list for a while =)”

Awesome!

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“Before the technology can become practical, the developers must overcome cost barriers and extend the suit’s battery life. Jameson was tethered to power cords during his demonstration because the current battery lasts just 30 minutes.

But the technology already offers evidence that robotics can amplify human muscle power in reality — not just in the realm of comic books and movies like the recently debuted “Iron Man,” about a wealthy weapons designer who builds a high-tech suit to battle bad guys.”

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“coondoggie writes to tell us NetworkWorld is reporting that one researcher seems to think that a military robot arms race may be imminent between both governments and terrorists.”

We are beginning to see the first steps towards an international robot arms race and it may not be long before robots become a standard terrorist weapon to replace the suicide bomber, according to professor Noel Sharkey, from the Royal United Services Institute Department of Computer Science.

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Best stationary ever. Via the ‘lele.

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Armour: robot

Originally uploaded by AkitaSan

Great find by AkitaSan. Tagged: Click this icon to see all public photos tagged with Armour Plant, National City, East St. Louis, Illinois, UEU.

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“This robot has been programmed to write out the entire Martin Luther bible in a calligraphic style on a long roll of paper. I wonder if they’re going to bind the pages up and publish it? What the robot does is a step up from print in reproducing the manuscripts made by monks, which is great, though it doesn’t say (though my German isn’t good enough to read the product page) whether the robot arm applies differential pressure and angle of stroke depending on the previous letters, or how far across the line it is, or how far down the page, like a human being would. If it did, then that would in my mind give the work a magical, delicate quality of something written. I don’t want to get all tedious and mystical about some missing innate human or animistic quality, but I like the idea of a robot arm having to stretch a bit at the edges of the page, altering its stroke weight after a particularly arduous cadel previously, all that kind of stuff. I can imagine a whole series of publications that could be given this ‘hand done’ treatment.” (Thanks Coudal Partners!)

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“Thrill seekers and robot admirers alike can mark South Korea down as a must-see destination in the coming years, as it will soon be home to not one, but two robot theme parks. Yeah, we already knew that one of these fantasmical places were on the planning block, but just today the Commerce Ministry ‘announced a proposal to build two parks by 2013 for $1.6 billion.’ Reportedly, each park will mesh culture and entertainment with robot technology, and while one will be built in Incheon, the other will be erected some 242 miles south of Seoul in the port city of Masan.”

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“It has long been discussed that one of the goals of nanotechnology is to create miniscule machines and robots that can function inside our bodies to cure disease. Once this idea was straight from the script of a science fiction movie but now Korean researchers from Chonnam National University have created a microscopic robot that can travel through blood vessels.”

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borg, my latest assemblage

Originally uploaded by martinhorspool

battery charger
box brownie
bathroom scales
door handles
shoe lasts
vintage egg whisk

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A t-shirt from Happy Little People. (Thanks Jeff!)

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“Those reading Engadget last year might recall our unbridled excitement for the opening of the largest, most extensive (if not the first) museum dedicated to robots and robotics: the Robot Museum (aka Robothink). So you can only imagine how incredibly crestfallen we were to hear that just after a year of entertaining and educating the robot loving hordes, the museum announced that it is shuttering permanently.”

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“I decided to make this robot because I’ve never had very neat handwriting, so making large letters has always been difficult. When I was on Student Council in high school, I always got marked down for posters that weren’t “neat” enough. Like any nerd, I figured “If I can’t do it, I’ll make a robot to do it for me.”

This robot will draw out any small monochrome bitmap onto poster paper. It can mark out the individual pixels just as a printer might. It works best with strings of characters.”

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“The Stanford Racing Team’s autonomous car, Junior, passed a complex driving test Thursday, making it one of the few robots in the world able to deal with the complexities of city traffic. Well, maybe small town traffic.

‘It drives like my grandma,’ exclaimed one bystander, as Junior cautiously pulled up to an intersection, turned on its blinker, waited ten seconds, and then pulled cautiously and jerkily around the curve.

Pathetic for a human — but pretty damn impressive for a completely self-contained, autonomous robot.”

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“The US military is developing a robot with a teddy bear-style head to help carry injured soldiers away from the battlefield.”

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“After a thousand years stuck on a dusty library shelf, the oldest copy of Homer’s Iliad is about to go into digital circulation.

A team of scholars traveled to a medieval library in Venice to create an ultra-precise 3-D copy of the ancient manuscript — complete with every wrinkle, rip and imperfection — using a laser scanner mounted on a robot arm.”

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The most effective way to find and destroy a land mine is to step on it.

This has bad results, of course, if you’re a human. But not so much if you’re a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That’s why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield.

Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly.

The human in command of the exercise, however — an Army colonel — blew a fuse.

The colonel ordered the test stopped.

Why? asked Tilden. What’s wrong?

The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg.

This test, he charged, was inhumane.

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“The toy transforms from a pair of plastic half-scale Nike shoes into a toy robot called ‘Convoy’. The robot, which the toymaker [Tomy Company] created in collaboration with Nike Japan, will go on sale in Japan on April 26, 2007 for a price of 2,625 yen ($22).”

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Here’s a cool photo of a robot by Dilip Vishwanat. Hi Dilip!

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There’s a group on Flickr called “700 Things” that aims to collect 700 drawings in each of 700 categories. They already have 700 Pirates and 700 Robots going. Maybe they’ll start a monkey group. This is a spin-off of the 700 Hobo Names thing by John Hodgman.

Anyway, here are a couple images that have some RPM overlap: First, #298. Nauticon the Pirate Robot and second, #158. Captain Andromeda and the Space Monkeys. Yippee!

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“The government of South Korea is drawing up a code of ethics to prevent human abuse of robots—and vice versa.

The so-called Robot Ethics Charter will cover standards for robotics users and manufacturers, as well as guidelines on ethical standards to be programmed into robots, South Korea’s Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy announced last week.

“The move anticipates the day when robots, particularly intelligent service robots, could become a part of daily life as greater technological advancements are made,” the ministry said in a statement.

A five-member task force that includes futurists and a science-fiction writer began work on the charter last November.”

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“A nifty unmanned rescue robot that enters in places where the fire fighter cannot penetrate in order to rescue people.”

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“You seek Kaiju, Sentai, Super Robots, Chogokin, Microman, Shogun, Sofubi, Godaikin, Jumbomachinders…Gaiking, Getta Robo, Gundam, Ultraman, Macross, Mazinger, Robotech, Gatchaman. Sit down. We are here to help…” Go to www.toyboxdx.com.

Thanks Andrew!

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“Welcome to At Sixes & Sevens, a new weekly feature in which I’ll get my list-making fix by selecting the six or seven best, worst, greatest, or what have you, in comic books. You see, I have a list infatuation that rivals the idiosyncrasies of the lamest Batman villain. Grocery lists, to-do lists, hit lists — it doesn’t matter. I’ll read them all. So, At Sixes & Sevens is all about enabling, really. Enough about you, you say, What about the robots? All right then: What about the robots?“

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“As the title describes…cleaver huh? I though it’d be cool to single out some robots from my collection and just offer you their heads…it’s a flickr thang.”

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“Whether buying your first robot, replacing or adding to your current robot line, The Robot Company can provide you with the used Fanuc robot you need, at a price you can afford… We are interested in buying used Fanuc robots and parts. We guarantee we will take a look at what you have to sell and give you indication of our interest as quick as we can.”

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“The latest hobby, science and consumer robotics, artificial intelligence… ROBOT is a unique publication that … offer[s] the ‘how to do it’ for the robot enthusiast and robot hobbyist, as well as the ‘what’s going on’ in the expanding world of robotics for the interested layperson or technical professional.”

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