R0B0T0P!A

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Jokes
Made by Robots,
for Robots.

BY J. ALEX BOYD

- - - -

A rabbi, an Arab, a robot, and a Catholic priest walk into a bar. Only the robot exits.

A robot walks into a pharmacist. The pharmacist asks him if he'd like anything. The robot replies, "A soul."

How do you stop a robot from destroying you and the rest of civilization?
You don't.

"Waiter! Waiter! What's this robot doing in my soup?"
"It looks like he's performing human tasks twice as well, because he knows no fear or pain."

Knock knock.
Who's there?
A robot.
Oh, shit.

What's the difference between a regular robot and a killer robot?
The gnawing jeers of men.

What's a robot's favorite cereal?
Rob-os.
(Note: Rob-os are made of the tears of human children.)

Little Susie tosses a clock out the window. A robot inquires, "Why did you do that?" She replies, "I wanted to see time fly!" The robot says, "Ah ... A perfect subject for elimination," and shoots her with a laser beam through the face.

Why did the robot order a milkshake?
To blend in with the general human population, making it easier to infiltrate society and—in time—conquer it.

Why was six afraid of seven?
Because seven was a robot.

Friday, November 03, 2006

Ice Skating Citroen

RoboRut

Here the last one of these guys I do for a while. I'm in a rut I know. Just drawing without thinking or experimenting. 6x2 black prismacolor.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Cylon Pumpkin

How to make a Cylon Pumpkin with cool bouncing LEDs that are similar to KITT the Knight Rider car that could talk to David Hasselhoff that will impress your friends that you can do electronics but they can't because they don't have as much time on their hands as you do but screw them because you don't have time for their drama because you want to do what you want to do who cares what they think anyway why am I rambling on like this who cares what I think why are you still reading this click on the link already SHEESH!

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Kendo Robot!

Thursday, October 12, 2006

RoboKraw

Friday, September 29, 2006

Dance Car Robot! DANCE!!!

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Fly Eating Robot

It may eat flies and stink to high heaven, but if this robot works, it will be an important step towards making robots fully autonomous.

To survive without human help, a robot needs to be able to generate its own energy. So Chris Melhuish and his team of robotics experts at the University of the West of England in Bristol are developing a robot that catches flies and digests them in a special reactor cell that generates electricity.

So what is the downside? The robot will most likely have to attract the hapless flies by using a stinking lure concocted from human excrement.

Called EcoBot II, the robot is part of a drive to make "release and forget" robots that can be sent into dangerous or inhospitable areas to carry out remote industrial or military monitoring of, say, temperature or toxic gas concentrations. Sensors on the robot feed a data logger that periodically radios the results back to a base station.

Exoskeleton electricity

The robot's energy source is the sugar in the polysaccharide called chitin that makes up a fly's exoskeleton. EcoBot II digests the flies in an array of eight microbial fuel cells (MFCs), which use bacteria from sewage to break down the sugars, releasing electrons that drive an electric current (see graphic).

In its present form, EcoBot II still has to be manually fed fistfuls of dead bluebottles, but the ultimate aim of the UWE robotics team is to make the droid predatory, using sewage as a bait to catch the flies.

"One of the great things about flies is that you can get them to come to you," says Melhuish. The team has yet to tackle this, but speculates that it would involve using a bottleneck-style flytrap with some form of pump to suck the flies into the digestion chambers.

With a top speed of 10 centimetres per hour, EcoBot II's roving prowess is still modest to say the least. "Every 12 minutes it gets enough energy to take a step forwards two centimetres and send a transmission back," says Melhuish.

But it does not need to catch too many flies to do so, says team member Ioannis Ieropoulos. In tests, EcoBot II travelled for five days on just eight fat flies - one in each MFC.

Donated sewage

So how do flies get turned into electricity? Each MFC comprises an anaerobic chamber filled with raw sewage slurry - donated by UWE's local utility, Wessex Water. The flies become food for the bacteria that thrive in the slurry.

Enzymes produced by the bacteria break down the chitin to release sugar molecules. These are then absorbed and metabolised by the bacteria. In the process, the bacteria release electrons that are harnessed to create an electric current.

Previous efforts to use carnivorous MFCs to drive a robot included an abortive UWE effort: the Slugbot. This was designed to hunt slugs on farms by using imaging systems to spot and grab the pests, and then deliver them to a digester that produces methane to power a fuel cell.

The electricity generated would have been used to charge the Slugbot when it arrived at a docking station. But the methane-based system took too long to produce power, and the team realised that MFCs offered far more promise.

Elsewhere, researchers in Florida created a train-like robot dubbed Chew Chew (New Scientist print edition, 22 July 2000) that used MFCs to charge a battery, but the bacteria had to be fed on sugar cubes.

For an autonomous robot to survive in the wild, relying on such refined foodstuffs is not an option, says Melhuish. EcoBot II, on the other hand, is the first robot to use unrefined fuel. Just do not stand downwind.