Photo by Ken Conley

Photo by Ken Conley

All you Lance Armstrong fans my like what's going on over at my Spare Cycles blog.

My co-workers fought in the heavyweight division at this weekend's RoboGames. Their robot, Counter Revolution, wields giant, counter-rotating blades made out of tool steel to deliver punishing blows. The blades aren't sharp, but that much tool steel can deliver quite a whack. The damage it was doing to the arena was definitely disconcerting to the organizers.

The design still needs some tweaks -- due to the inherent danger in running the robot, the only 'debugging' they've been able to do is at a filming of Battlebots as well as at RoboGames. What got them this time around were the holes they made in the base plate to lighten the robot. I'm looking forward to the next design iteration. There's too many boring combat robots out there, so I always enjoy a robot that puts even the announcer on edge with the potential for havoc.

You can see more video of them fighting on YouTube. Here's one from Friday where they managed to rip off the top of the other robot (about 2 minutes in):

• Engadget: Willow Garage's PR2 Robot Breaks, Enters, Steal Electricity
• Gizmodo: Self-Charging PR2 Robot Travels From Room to Room in Search of Power
• IEEE Spectrum: Willow Garage PR2 Robot Navigates Through Office
• Robots.net
• GeekBrief.tv

It's always amusing to read about your work, especially in blogs you read everyday. Some of the comments make you want to say, "man, their readers are a bunch of idiots." Then you realize you read that site as well ;). But I kid, it's great to see that this Milestone has captured people's imaginations. It gives us motivation to go even bigger.

To follow up on my previous post, here's John Markoff's take for the New York Times:

Opening Doors on the Way to a Personal Robot

I've been relatively incommunicado these past several weeks, but it's been with good reason. After a two-week trip to Japan, I got back in time to witness my company hit its second major milestone: our robot was able to plug itself in at nine different outlets in our building, which required it to navigate around our building as well as open eight different doors along the way. In a separate run, it also managed to do a 26.2-mile marathon, pausing only to be recharged -- that's 30 hours of faultless operation. I have no personal claim to the navigation, plugging, or door success, but I'm amazed that I work with talented people who face difficult goals knowing that we will achieve them.

I don't know if this sounds big to your average non-roboticist, so I'll try and put this in context: our robot is self-sufficient. Most robots have limited battery life and must achieve their tasks within that time. Most research robots are closely followed around by students, who stand ready with an emergency stop button to shut it down when something goes wrong (and it will). We've long since left our wireless emergency stop button hanging from the back of the robot. In order to complete the marathon, we even left the robot running while we went home to get some sleep (I use the royal 'we' here; I was in Japan). We didn't experience a single hardware issue, despite the heavy use required for testing and debugging the milestone. And now, it our robot can take care of itself.

If we are to start thinking about making robots take care of us, this is a crucial first step.

The elevator in the Ginza Apple Store has one button. The elevator stops on every floor.

I bought a stick from Tokyu Hands. They wrapped it very well. I didn't know how to explain that its stick-ness could not be harmed.

The lady at the Kobe beef place refused to serve anything to our vegetarian friends. In her defense, even the fried rice was cooked in Kobe beef.