Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
I had the happy accident of seeing a sign for the Wired Nextfest in a subway on Tuesday and made it one of the last things on the big list for NYC.
Holy crap, all the time I was there I kept thinking Roy Batty’s line from Blade Runner "I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…’ This was stuff that I had blogged about or read of in magazines…
The military hates to let a cool idea die, the J-UCAS smart drone was supposed to be an un manned areal vehicle that could take out the enemy or jam radar systems. Pretty much it was going to be tasked with trail blazing the way for manned missions into hostile territory. Not an all together bad idea, who likes to be shot at? However, after possible budget considerations, the idea of using this platform as an upgrade to the long range bomber fleet. With China fast becoming a replacement for our cold war adversary this tool may be just the thing we need to maintain balance in the world.
Making money at robot combat it hard to do. building them is expensive and there aren’t all that many places that are willing to hand over sponsor money now that BattelBots isn’t on TV any more. Running the events is even tougher, just finding a place that will let you have robot carnage can be quite daunting. And don’t get me started on the arena… Wow… Anyway, these two bright ex auto engineers might have a solution to all this. They have built a four player robot ‘king-of-the-hill’ into an arcade game. Plunk in your coins and the center combat ring (the ‘dohyo’ for those that are familiar with robot sumo and real sumo) lifts up and the action begins. Whoever pushes the last robot off the platform is the winner. Sounds like a great idea, I saw something like it in a science museum in Yokohama and there was a guy in Tucson making arcade like robot demonstration cases, but none involved combat. These are quite clever, I hope to play one someday soon and I wish the best of luck to the both of them.
[via robot gossip robot dreams]
Reminds me of a certain flying camera that I blogged about a while back. Except the part about shooting molten metal at the targets that is…
"The 3-D maneuverability of the Frisbee-UAV [unammned aerial vehicle] will provide revolutionary tactical access and lethality against hostiles hiding in upper story locations and/or defiladed behind obstacles," the company promises. The circular drones will be lanuched "from munitions dispensers or by means of a simple mechanism similar to a shotgun target (skeet) launcher," Triton adds. Once in the air, they’ll be tele-operated by soldiers on the ground. Or, if needed, the fightin’ frisbees will pilot themselves as they hunt for guerrillas. Once they catch up to the baddies, the drones will use a series of armor-piercing explosives, shooting jets of molten metal, to eliminate their targets.
Need a small PC for somthing? Don’t care if it runs Windows or not? Here you go, this computer might be for you. I’m thinking this would make for one hell of a brain on a robot. With all the USB ports you could interface sensors and if you needed more storage you could pop in a multi gig compact flash card in the CF slot.
Fanless Design
VESA mounting support (as depicted at right)
Processor — 166MHz Pentium (MMX-capable x86) x 3IUs
Memory — soldered-on 128 MB SDRAM
Input/output ports IDE
10/100 Mbps Ethernet
3 x USB V1.1
Optional RS232 Expansion — CompactFlash slot
2.5-inch hard drive mounting
Ultra-low power
PXE diskless boot
"…MicroClient Jr. supports most any version of Linux not based on Gnome, KDE, or other heavy desktop frameworks. He suggests using FWM95, ICEWM, XFce, or Fluxbox instead…
Nice!
This broke my heart when I found out that this robot is just used to promote the upcoming Ghost in the Shell DVD "Solid State Society". Crud, I was hoping that it was a general release item (check out its specs). The robot, or ‘tachikoma‘ as it’s called in the series, is a police robots that is fast, agile, and sports quite a personality. Imagine a hyper Japanese school girl in the armored body of a high speed, gun toting robot. Cool, eh? Yeah! Well this robot model is about foot and a half long and has 19 degrees of movement. There are a few videos of it moving here and here. By the way, the designer of these guys is Tomotaka Takahashi. He’s kind of a God amongst robot designers. If you wondering why you should go have a look at some of his creations.
[via Robot Gossip]