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This guy's got nothing on the Giant Cardboard Robots i saw at the Maker Faire.
http://www.gorobotics.net/the-news/misc/turn-yourself-into-a-giant-cardboard-robot/
-Taylor

>generally trust Amazon more than I do the small fry sites they 'affiliate' with.

I think you're a bit misguided here. The "small fry sites" you're referring to are sites, like mine, that link to Amazon products in exchange for a cut from Amazon. It's huge marketing for Amazon, and a tidy revenue for me and others. But not now. I'm in NC and I got screwed. Amazon hasn't killed people *selling* products, they've just cut off people that are doing free advertising for them.

Exactly. The article hints at an aging populace, so I presume servants of some sort will be common place in nursing care centers. As depressing as this sounds, for those long periods when seniors have no visits from their family, a sentient emotionally equipped servant would be beneficial. Even dogs and cats have shown therapeutic effects in nursing homes.

It's too late. They should have come up with this "code" before they invented this: http://www.gorobotics.net/The-News/Military/South- Korea-Develops-Machine%11Gun-Sentry-Robot/

Those seniors have NO chance!

get one for $200K http://www.gorobotics.net/The-News/Military/South- Korea-Develops-Machine%11Gun-Sentry-Robot/ or build your own http://ringmast3r.no-ip.com/sentry/

Did anybody else follow the links which point to the source of the article?

The original slashdot story link
http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/samsung_develo ps_machine_gun_sentry_robot_costs_200k.php

which has a link to a story
http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/sam sungs-200000-machine-gun-sentry-robot

which in turn links to
http://www.gorobotics.net/The-News/Military/South- Korea-Develops-Machine%11Gun-Sentry-Robot/

that has a link to probably to the original story at
http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20060 928-042215-5882r
by AFP

The original doesn't have an image nor video but as story it's far better than the article (rip off) mentioned in slashdot story.

Could you have found a more annoying, ad-infested site to link to? Must have searched for a while. Try this one instead: http://www.gorobotics.net/The-News/Military/South- Korea-Develops-Machine%11Gun-Sentry-Robot/

NCSU AUV Postmortem (brief-ish)

Some news (and a podcast I think) was posted at http://www.gorobotics.net/ Our basic work schedule was all day at TRANSDEC, 4 hour sleep period and work through the night+morning, every day. Some of us still haven't slept enough to catch up.

Tuesday morning - packed the robot into huge pelican cases. The robot just cleared the 100lb weight limit of any package for the plane by 1.5lbs. No alarms were sounded over 5 guys carrying suitcases and giant black boxes onto a plane...

Tuesday and Wednesday in San Diego, we spent unpacking and checking in. Early wednesday we battled with an issue with our 250ft ethernet tether (just used for testing) that we had put on just before we left for san diego. We bought a new 100ft cable and put that on. We put the AUV in the water in the afternoon and did some pipe following and bin detection (see the rules for details on all the goals) until it was too dark to really do anything. I had seen how murky the water was by this point and hoped the darkness of the pool would somewhat simulate the real thing. We never got bin detection to work because of other problems during the week, but that was still more than what most teams had. We met some of the other teams and found out that some people had been watching our progress (via pictures and a video on the http://ncsurobotics.org/ website) and were excited to see the AUV perform. We had it do some crowd pleasing rolls and spins.

Thursday was our first day of testing in TRANSDEC but we were limited by our 100ft of cable (and no wireless buoy) so we could only clear the gate and go no farther. I was rather unimpressed by the lack of teams that got into the water and some of the teams that didn't even have a finished vehicle. I met some really cool guys and I don't doubt their dedication to their respective AUV's, though. (Thanks for the beer guys!) We built a wireless buoy out of some other parts we had brought with us.

Friday was a lot of fun. KUSI (local San Diego news station) and AUVSI took lots of footage of the NCSU AUV performing (before our catastrophic failures). We spent probably 2+ hours in the pool and demonstrated basic gate navigation and docking with the docking station (no other team did this AFAIK--Duke accidently ran into it without any sort of image processing). In the afternoon (after a long break from the pool while we worked on some images we had captured and tweaking the image processing algos), we changed out batteries and someone accidently plugged a cable into the wrong port (won't name names here) and blew our I2C controller chip. We replaced that in time to get the last practice slot of the day. We started to notice some problems with the vehicle (thrusters not working quite right) and pulled it in after about 30 mins. We took the vehicle back and ran through all the tests we would normally run and couldn't find anything wrong. Sometimes the thrusters would work fine, sometimes they wouldn't work at all. We got the static judging results and came in 14/19, I'm not sure why. Everything was solid in our presentation and the only impression I got was that our vehicle seemed *too* good for a first year team. After being back in the hotel pool, everything seemed to be ok again. I don't remember exactly what we worked on that night, but I'm sure it was more image processing (something no one really had) or acoustics.

Saturday was rough. A decision was made by someone who didn't have the authority to make the decision and we were nearly disqualified. We got another shot at qualifying in the afternoon and that's when the big-bad-problems happened. The thrusters just didn't work. We pulled the robot back in and took it back to the hotel to completely dismantle it and figure out what was wrong with it. We also looked into putting in a wireless card of some sort (we had a wireless bridge almost working) so we could communicate to the AUV easier. Pulled an

I run a website about amatuer robotics. It includes projects and such. Unfortunately someone hacked the site and my ISP is being bad about getting it back up and running, so some of the functionality is off. GoRobotics.net. Also, The Robot Directory.

... it will be really awesome. I was working with them over the summer working on my website, GoRobotics.net. They have a whole lot of really great ideas. Believe me, they don't want it to turn out to be a big trade show that normal geeks can't afford any more than we do. While some thing may seem expensive you have to remember that this stuff does cost money and nothing is free in this world ... including music and software. The TechCircus still has a few bugs to work out, but hey, this is their first show. I've talked a bit with Will Jahnke, the head guy at the Circus, and he definitely has a vision. Fear not geeks, it could really rock!

If you want to get started in robotics. Then I suggest you vist GoRobotics.net. We have projects, links, books, resources, tutorials, news, and more. If you have any questions just ask. I'd also recommend signing up for as many robotics related e-mail loops as possible. That's how I learned. -William