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Do you ever find yourself in need of exactly 101 awesome Robot T-Shirts? Your long search is over thanks to the T-Shirt Blog, HIDEYOURARMS. This is quite possibly the single most comprehensive list of robot related torso wear the internets has ever seen, so I won’t bore you with the many reasons on why it is awesome. Instead, click the picture below and enjoy!
Our friends over at RoboCommunity have just sent us a link to an unboxing thread of the WowWee FlyTech Bat:
Designed to totally creep the living hell out of you at the same time that you’re terrorizing your dog/cat/iguana/Geico Gecko, this bat flies vertically, yes vertically in the air! What really impressed me was the charge vs. operating time being near equal. It took a mere 4 minutes in order to get between 5-7 operating time! Hey, considering these large humanoids getting like an hour or so tops for a 4-5 hour charge, this is really impressive!
What in the world is FlyTech you ask? FlyTech is a new series of really cool toy robots from WowWee. Yes, they all fly, and do a pretty good job at it too! You can check out all of the exciting new robots at FlyTech Online or over in RoboCommunity’s FlyTech Category.
via RoboCommunity
We just got WowWee’s RS Media in stock! As we’re sure you already know, this is the newest incarnation of the revolutionary Robosapien series, and it’s clearly the most advanced robotic media appliance on the consumer market. I don’t even know where to start. First off, it’s huge. Well, it’s 23 inches tall, which may not sound that huge, but it’s pretty imposing. If you stood him on a stool in the middle of a room full of dancing badgers, nobody would pay attention to the badgers. That’s right.
Check it:
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| Hello, sir. Please don’t hurt me. |
We’re glad that WowWee finally strayed from the white-with-black-accents motif. RS Media proves that they are no longer competing with Apple for shiny monochromatic blandness. Here’s a full shot of him, still in the box. Unfortunately, he’s going to have to stay there until we have time to give him a proper test-run.
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| As with all WowWee products, he’s strapped into his box like a monkey ready to be shot into space. A space monkey. |
Seriously though, you’ll need much more than a test-run to really get the full experience. It has more amazing features than Ron Popiel’s Magic Rotisserie. For starters, it’s a really cool looking bipedal humanoid robot that’s loaded with sensors and other goodies. That, in and of itself, should have you running for your credit card. It can roam free, responding to its environment by talking to inanimate objects and ordering around your other WowWee Robo-family bots. From the remote, you can trigger demo moves, walk around using three different gaits, move his arms around, pick up and throw stuff, switch between his different personalities, and run through his various media capabilities.
Let’s talk about those media capabilities. RS Media is a walking and talking MP3 player, audio recorder, still picture camera, video recorder, video player, and video game system. If he had cell phone and internet capabilities, you’d pretty much never have to buy another piece of consumer electronics ever again. Pretty much everything he does is modifiable via a slick software interface. He connects to your computer via USB, and from there you can upload and download music, pictures, videos, personalities (including new voice files), motions, and Java games. He has 40 MB of on-board memory flash memory, but you can add up to 1 GB to this by installing an SD memory card.
RS Media comes packaged with several Java games (one of them resembles the old Neo Geo game "Bust-a-Move," one of the greatest time-killer games ever), and you can even upload Java-based mobile phone games!
For those of you who haven’t seen it, here’s WowWee’s promotional video:
For more information, check out the following links:
Robosapien RS Media product page at Trossen Robotics
Official RS Media Home Page
RS Media Roboguide page at Evosapien.com (Hacking tips, including pictures of RS Media’s guts!)
Last week, when we got back from the iHobby Expo, there was a nice surprise waiting for us: our iSOBOT shipment finally arrived! Naturally, we did what all decent geeks do when they get a new toy. We took a bunch of pictures and videos, and now we’re sticking them on the internet.
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| The box is pretty awesome. It looks like brushed stainless steel. It’s so shiny that it kept overloading my camera’s iris, causing most of my pictures to come out almost completely black. |
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| More shiny packaging. |
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| Still more. |
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Ok, here’s what you get:
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| Download the Action Table and manual in PDF form for a closer look! |
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| He’s just a little taller than a piece of American paper currency. |
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| Leg detail: The servos in this guy are freaking TINY. You have no idea how hard it was to resist the temptation to just tear this thing apart and build something else out of the tiny servos. |
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| The battery case, located in i-SOBOT’s chest cavity, holds three AAA batteries. Below the batteries you’ll see his speaker, which is behind the gray plastic grill. |
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| Hand detail: The thumb, finger, and wrist are movable, but not motorized. |
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| Head detail: The head swivels. There is one green LED inside, and one blue LED outside. |
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| The IR receiver, located on this critter’s right shoulder, looks identical to the one found on Robonova’s head. |
And now, some videos!
| Quick demo. One of the cool things about i-SOBOT is that, in addition to using the canned motions, you can also directly control his limbs from the controller. That’s mostly what we were doing in this video. |
| Here are some of his slick fighting moves. He punches, kicks, and makes some fun sounds effects. He also talks, laughs, and I think he even begs for mercy at one point. |
Let’s get right to the heart of this thing. Project CONDOR is a high-tech immersive multimedia sensory experience. An array of eight robotically controlled helium-filled blimps, each with a speaker hanging from it, dynamically repositioning sound sources, with audio streaming to each blimp via Bluetooth, playing a separate part of an electronic musical composition, floating around inside a large indoor space, accompanied by a light show and video projections… I’m on the verge of a flashback just from writing that sentence, so I can only imagine how trippy the actual performance is going to be. Tonight and tomorrow night (That’s June 29 and 30, 2007), starting at 8 pm, Project CONDOR will take flight in Chicago’s Broadway Armory. Admission is only 10 bucks, and I have no idea how many people they’re letting in, so get there early if you want to check it out.
Thanks to Chicago Public Radio for covering this story while I was on my way to work this morning. Their pledge drive is still going on, so head over to WBEZ.org and give them some money.
Project CONDOR event posting at Metromix
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| I couldn’t find any Project CONDOR pictures, so I ran a Google image search for “psychedelic blimps” and this is what I got. |
For real this time!
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| Everybody’s favorite designer life form! |
This is not a drill, folks. Pleo, the first UGOBE Life Form, is now available for pre-order, and Trossen Robotics is proud to be one of the first to make it available to you! I promise this time it’s legit! I know it’s been a long journey, and it’s not over yet, but the important thing is this: You are one step closer to having an adorable robotic pet dinosaur waddling around your house. This guy is not just a pile of touch sensors, prox sensors, microphones, motors, and microchips. UGOBE has pulled out all the stops to make Pleo as lifelike as possible. The “Life OS”â„¢ artificial intelligence focuses on behaviors that should remind us of the baby animals we’re more familiar with. He explores, communicates, responds to his environment, and develops a personality that reflects the way he’s treated.
Pleo is officially slated to start shipping in October, but it will be a limited production run so you’d better secure yours today.
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| Click the picture above to see all the bells and whistles! |
For more tech information and a bunch of high-quality photos, check out our UGOBE Pleo pre-order page.
…is an unbelievable band that you really need to experience to understand. From their press kit:
“Captured! By Robots was started back in 1996. Jason Vance could not get along with human musicians and he decided to build himself a band… a band of robots. Shortly before their completion, he accidentally spilled coffee on their CPUs. When he awoke the next morning, they had come to life and he had been given a Bio-Cerebral chip that allows them to control him. From that point on, he was JBOT, of Captured! By Robots.”
Yeah. JBOT and his creations put on a great show, busting out quirky rock and metal tunes with a robot-supremacy theme. Since the Trossen Robotics team will be out at Maker Faire this weekend, we’re going to miss their gig in Chicago. If you live in or around Chicago, C!BR is playing on Saturday May 19 at The Note. Go there. Seriously. You will be entertained and impressed. I should probably note here that this is not a family show. C!BR will terrify small children and offend those with delicate sensibilities. Thankfully, I don’t think many people from either of those groups read this blog.
Here’s the next few stops on the tour, if you’re interested:
May 17, 2007 Minneapolis, MN @ Triple Rock
May 18, 2007 Madison, WI @ The Annex
May 19, 2007 Chicago, IL @ The Note
May 20, 2007 Dekalb, IL @ Ottos
May 22, 2007 Champaign, IL @ High Dive
May 23, 2007 Carbondale, IL @ Big Boy’s BBQ
May 24, 2007 St Louis, MO @ Off Broadway
So check out the Captured! By Robots web site, head out to The Note this Saturday, and don’t forget to tip your bartender.
Okay, we aren’t the fastest bloggers in the world here at Trossen Robotics… That’s because we are pretty busy building up our catalogue with lots of robot goodies for all you people and working on the TRS system so we can release it before the rapture. You want us working on this stuff also don’t you? 
Anyhow, if you haven’t heard that the Pleo has had another slight delay then you probably haven’t turned on your computer since the weekend. Rather than recycle the story again we’ll just give you a link dump and some cute pictures.
…and yes, Trossen Robotics should be selling the Pleo. We are just as excited about him as all of you
Here’s a Wired Mag article about the Pleo by Clive Thompson
Lastly, the Pleo Homepage
Photos courtesy of Perspective BrandingYoutube Vid from CES
