The week in robotics (Dec 4th-Dec 19th, 2006)

I have been very busy this week so I was not able to post very often. However, here is a brief overview of what happened in the world of robotics and artificial intelligence for the second week of December 2006.

DARPA increased the prize money for teams participating in the Urban Challenge. Specifically, the top team completing the course will now receive $2 million, the second team $1 million and the 3rd team $500,000. In addition, the 78 teams competing without government funding will not receive separate award money but compete for the top 3 prizes along with the 11 teams receiving DARPA’s financial support. The announcement for prize money is good news for the teams because earlier this year DARPA had said that they won’t be able to pay the prize money originally announced because of a law prohibiting DARPA from distributing such money.

K-team introduced the 3rd update to their Kephera mini-robot platform. The Kephera III is built around the KoreBot system and it comes equipped with multiple sensor arrays including sonar, infrared and vision. The robot is small and well suited for experimentation in swarm robotics. It is also a beautiful platform for educational or home use. Kephera III runs Linux and it is programmable using the GNU C/C++ cross-compiler making it easy to port existing libraries for use with this platform. Taking advantage of the KoreBot board, Kephera III is easily upgradeable with Compact Flash extension cards and additional storage space.

Finally, on the lighter side of things, robots demonstrated their bartending skills at the Roboexotica Festival in Vienna. Wired News has good coverage of the event describing a number of the robots in display including Robert Martin’s Robomoji and David Calkins’s Chapok, the only robot to have somewhat humanoid form.