Most sophisticated MARS rover ever

"Curiosity" is the name of the most sophisticated rover NASA ever sent to MARS. It is also the biggest, it has the size of a small car. In fact it is a mobile laboratory that will explore MARS for at least two years. This video shows how the landing is planned. A challenging operations with such a large and heavy device! The curious robot is planned to be launched to the red planet in Nov/Dec 2011.



The construction of the rover can be followed via a live stream:


Free Videos by Ustream.TV

LEGO in space

LEGO Education, a division of the company that makes the popular Mindstorms line of robots, will send 13 LEGO Education models to the International Space Station (ISS) on board the Space Shuttle Endeavor.
Onboard the ISS, the astronauts will explore the effects of microgravity on simple machines by building models, conducting experiments, and sharing those results with students and teachers back on Earth through video and crew commentary.
How cool is that! Sounds like lots of fun for both the students and the astronauts. More on this site.

Robots learn to spell

This video shows a collection of robots that spell out a word. The robots don't know their absolute position within each letter, they only know their position relative to their robot friends. Look what happens when one of the droids is removed from the pack and put back at a random location.

Robots learn to share

These robots learn through evolutionary programming. Fascinating and fun to watch!

FEZ robot

While waiting for my FEZ kit to arrive I ran into the following short video which gives a nice idea of what I can expect:

FEZ Mini Robot Demo from Szymon Kobalczyk on Vimeo.

Microsoft DevDays

Last week I visited the Microsoft DevDays in Den Haag. During this two day conference Rob Miles was one of the speakers. He introduced me to the .NET Micro Framework which allows us to develop embedded (robot) code in .NET with C#.
Rob's enthusiastic lecture relit the smoldering robotics fire in me. Having spent many hours with robots in 2007/2008, I somehow lost interest and got caught up with other stuff in life. It's about time to resume my robotics journey and the .NET Micro Framework will be the first new step.
As a start I read through the TinyCLR web site and ordered the FEZ Mini Robot Kit that allows me to start experimenting with NETMF.

Unmanned vehicles

The next video shows them all: robot planes, helis, rockets, boats, submarines, cars, tanks and more!
This very impressive video is made by the AUVSI - The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. Have fun!