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The CMU Robotics Institute, with the help of a seven million dollar DARPA grant, has announced the launch of a four year educational initiative called Fostering Innovation through Robotics Exploration (FIRE). The goal is to use student interest in robotics to encourage computer science education, and to steer students toward science and engineering careers. In addition to embracing existing educational robotics competitions such as FIRST and VEX, CMU will also be creating new competitions.

The initiative will ... create new competitions for autonomous, multi-robot teams and for computer animations that will attract a broader array of students and offer new challenges.

To help, CMU is tapping robot expertise from Dallas, TX, hiring none other than Ed Paradis, current president of the Dallas Personal Robotics Group. When asked about the propsect of leaving one of the nation's top Hobby Robot Groups for CMU, he replied, "although I'm sad to leave the Dallas robotics community, this is a hobby roboticists dream job!".

Dr Sylvain Calinon of the Italian Institute of Technology writes, "The blog is great, but it seriously lacks some pancake flipping robot videos!!" Well, we aim to please, so here's some video of a robot learning to flip artificial pancakes. By coincidence, this pancake flipping robot is the work of Dr Petar Kormushev and Dr Sylvain Calinon from the Italian Institute of Technology. It's an impressive feat of engineering but it's also just crazy fun to watch a robot throwing pancakes around. For more, see the paper Robot Motor Skill Coordination with EM-based Reinforcement Learning

The latest episode of the Robots podcast interviews Brian Yamauchi, Lead Roboticist at the iRobot Research Group. Yamauchi gives an overview of some of the major developments at iRobot, including new ways of sensing, human-robot interaction and collaboration in the Packbots. He also reveals some details on iRobot's LANdroid (already mentioned in a previous post), Chembot (see previous post) and Jambot projects and shares his view on the ethics of military robots and the future of robotics. For more information, read more on the Robots website or directly tune in to the podcast!

By now most residents of the Dallas / Fort Worth area are aware of the giant, 35,000 lbs steel robot that towers over DART's Deep Ellum rail station. Robot builders may also be aware of the robot from coverage in Robot Magazine. Now, the rest of the world is taking notice because the prominent art organization, Americans for the Arts, has included the Dallas Robot, known officially as Traveling Man, on its list of 40 Best Public Art Works in the US and Canada. Read on to learn more about Traveling Man and see more photos of the big robot and little chrome friends.

The latest episode of the Robots podcast focusses on using robots to model biology. The first guest is Barbara Webb, who is director of the Insect Robotics Group at the University of Edinburgh and has published several seminal papers on the subject (her 2008 paper on "Using robots to understand animal behavior" is a good place to start). Following an earlier interview on her work, Webb now addresses more complex questions: What is the importance of distributed control and embodiment in biological systems? and How do we find equally powerful solutions for robots? This episode's second guest is Steffen Wischmann, who is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the EPFL and at the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Wischmann has a long-standing, deep interest in robotic models and his work has covered both embodied and cognitive aspects of robot models. He outlines the value of robotic models for biology, describes their strengths and limitations, and explains their increasingly important role in research fields that cannot rely on a fossil record to understand the evolution of traits, such as animal communication. Read on or directly tune in!

The 3rd annual AUVSI Autonomous Surface Vehicle Competition (ASVC) is over and first place went to the University of Michigan. The University of Central Florida took 2nd place and University of Rhode Island came in third. Check the ASVC website for complete results. You can watch more video of the the event online.

In its latest episode, the Robots podcast interviews Sonia Chernova at the Personal Robots Group at MIT's Media Lab. Chernova is using a free, online game called Mars Escape to learn about how humans and robots can work in teams. As you log into the game, you are teamed up with a second human player, with one person taking on the role of an astronaut, and the other one controlling a Nexi robot. You and your astronaut (or robot) partner then find yourselves on a mission on Mars, where you will have to brave various challenges. This episode's second guest is Kenton Williams, also from the Media Lab. In the interview, Williams shares some of the technical aspects behind one of the Media Lab's most expressive robots, the MDS robot Nexi. Play the game, read on, or tune in!

Later this month, Carnegie Mellon's CMDragons small-size robotic soccer team will be competing again at RoboCup, to be held in Singapore. CMDragons has tended to find their edge in their software as opposed to their hardware. Their latest software advantage will be their new "physics-based planning", using physics to decide how to move and turn with the ball in order to maintain control. Previous control strategies simply planned where the robot should move to and shoot from, assuming a ball placed at the front center of the dribbler bar would stay there. The goal of Robocup is to create a humanoid robotic soccer team to compete against human players in 2050. Manuela Veloso, the professor who leads the Carnegie Mellon robotic soccer lab, "believe[s] that the physics-based planning algorithm is a particularly noteworthy accomplishment" that will take the effort one step closer to the collective goal.

Matt Fischer, CTO of KumoTek Robotics in Richardson, TX sent us a copy of their latest press release and writes, "We are launching a huge interactive robotics exhibit in Chicago". The exhibit features robot dinosaurs built by Kokoro in Japan and loaded with interactive robot technology from KumoTek.

RoboSUE, a robotically animated recreation of the famous Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, is the main attraction in the experience. She is outfitted with cameras, sensors and artificial intelligence which is sure to scare anyone that comes near. The show is not scripted and no two visitors will have the same experience. The dinosaurs track guests in real-time, responding based on the actions of each individual visitor, and even interact among themselves.

The exhibit opened yesterday and runs through September 6, so check it out if you're in the area. Read on for the full text of KumoTek's press release.

We've already reported on French company Aldebaran's Nao in a previous post. Nao has since grown up and made it into the RoboCup Standard Platform League. The latest episode of the Robots podcast interviews Luc Degaudenzi, Aldebaran's Vice President in Engineering, and his colleague Cédric Vaudel, who is Aldebaran's Sales Manager for North America. In addition, and as a premiere on the Robots Podcast, we also interview a robot. Nao introduces himself and and then shares his own version of Star Wars. Read more or tune in!