if I may toot my own horn - that’s kind of the point of a blog, isn’t it? - I have written the single most brilliant geek-oriented musical parody ever to grace the English-language stage: “West Side Story” re-done for a high school FIRST robotics team. I wrote about this in my Telegraph column this [...]

I have a quickie story in the Sunday Telegraph about MobileRobots of Amherst, NH, a small company that is trying to take its autonomous robots out of factories and research labs into doctor’s offices and other near-consumer markets. The complicated stuff is making it robust and with a simple-enough interface to be usable by non-trained [...]

There are lots of schools-build-robots-and-compete-with-them competitions (oh FIRST, what have thou wrought?), but I’ve never heard of one with a $500,000 prize. Worcester Polytechnic Institute says that’s how much a group of students, faculty and alumni won in a NASA contest to develop a robot to dig up moon dust. The Regolith (a.k.a. moondust) Excavation [...]

Spotted via Boing Boing: Researchers at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia built a skiing robot. Here’s the story in Make. (That’s a screen shot above - don’t except it to play!) I don’t think there’s much more I can say about it, except to wonder why Dean Kamen didn’t do it first.

My Telegraph column today is about two BAE Systems software engineers overseeing a project to create open-source versions of the new controller software for the FIRST robot competition. It’s geek-errific!

Xconomy has a nice piece about iRobot’s entry into underwater robots - those small autonomous submarines that are becoming an important tool in ocean research, which we’ve discussed before.

Autonomous undersea subs for ongoing ocean research - Roomba meets Aquaman meets a post-doc - are a solid niche in the robot world. Our good friends iRobot have demonstrated that

The dream of any state is to have a self-generating industry, a la Silicon Valley - an industry that spontaneously grows it own companies, better than any other location does. Minicomputers are the obvious Boston-area example; biotech hasn’t quite gotten there yet. This Globe article raises the hope that robotics might do it. From the [...]