SparkFun is doing it again. On January 11, 2012, they will be giving away $100 gift codes to 2,000 lucky electronics hobbyists. The prizes will be awarded randomly, and are good for 60 days. Free Day started in 2010 as a way to give back to the community (and hopefully ...

I’m a sucker for robots of any sort, but make them big and creepy and you’ve got my attention. This one does so in spades. Titanoboa is a 50 foot long electromechanical snake weighing in at 2,000 pounds, built by the same guys who brought us the giant mechanical spider ...

Science fiction is full of examples of humans and machines interacting verbally, but until recently any attempts at voice recognition have been met with limited success. Even today the level of success attained by advanced tools like Siri is up for debate. If you’re lucky enough to speak English without ...

I have a daughter who wants to design robots. She used to want to be an astronaut, and now she thinks that maybe she’d still like to go into space, but “only for a year or so,” since she’s discovered it could be a dangerous job. I assured her that ...

For several years now, Honda has been working on a humanoid robot design called ASIMO. The robot has been very much a work-in-progress, with the usual mix of success and glitches that entails. Undeterred by those glitches, the engineers at Honda have persevered, and the latest demo of ASIMO shows ...

A few years back, Boston Dynamics impressed us with their quadruped robot, Big Dog. Well, believe it or not, they’ve managed to top that with their latest bipedal robot, PETMAN: The Boston Dynamics guys had this to say about PETMAN: PETMAN is an anthropomorphic robot developed by Boston Dynamics for testing special ...

Much as I would love to have a Kinect, we have neither the space nor the hardware for it. But in the course of researching sensors for an upcoming book of robotics projects I’m working on, I found this cool explanation of how the Kinect uses infrared radiation detectors to ...

Today is the day: Bots High — A Documentary on High School Combat Robots screens today on the net and around the country. Check out their free screening page for more information about screenings, and to see if one is scheduled near you. I’ve received an advanced copy of the DVD ...

Robot season is upon us and the competition is starting to heat up. If you happen to find a free weekend I recommend that you look up a local competition and check it out. It is amazing how fired up kids can get about robots. Unfortunately there is no single place ...

This past summer Siena College held robotics camps for children ages 7 – 12. They were a huge success, with children learning how to build and program robots, plus, understand the physics behind the movements. Working with NXT can be fun, but challenging. To keep up the interest behind the ...