In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Shuo Yang about DJI’s RoboMaster first-person shooter (FPS) competition, a competition designed to get people excited about robotics. For the competition, university teams build and program a robot to go against DJI’s robots in a shooting battle. Each robot has a way of propelling marble-sized plastic balls and pressure sensors on their sides to register if they’ve been hit by an opponent’s projectile. Shuo speaks about the goals of the competition, the teams that are involved, what strategies the teams use, the difficulties the team had in making their robot’s good competitors, the future of the challenge, and how people can get involved.

In this interview, Audrow Nash interviews Marco Hutter, Assistant Professor for Robotic Systems at ETH Zürich, about a quadrupedal robot designed for autonomous operation in challenging environments, called ANYmal. Hutter discusses ANYmal’s design, the ARGOS oil and gas rig inspection challenge, and the advantages and complexities of quadrupedal locomotion. 

The European Robotics League (ERL) announced the winners of ERL Emergency Robots 2017 major tournament, during the awards ceremony held on Saturday, 23rd September at Giardini Pro Patria, in Piombino, Italy.

In addition to the Competition Awards, Marta Palau Franco from Bristol Robotics Laboratory and ERL Emergency project manager introduced the referees’ special awards.

FIRST (For Recognition and Inspiration of Science and Technology) is a robotics program for students from K-12, and I was in the last division, FRC. The program is about more than introducing students to STEM and giving them hands-on experience, it’s about helping students to grow and have positive impacts by recognizing community service efforts, celebrating good values, developing soft skills, and guiding students to pursue higher education.

A record number of teams submitted beautiful robot-created artwork for the second year of this 5-year worldwide competition. In total, there were 38 teams from 10 countries who submitted 200 different artworks!

Robo Done, the robotic academy franchise for kids from Osaka, Japan, celebrated Japan’s Day of the Children on the 5th of May at their annual event, Robot Festival 2017 or RoboFes. The event welcomed over 1,000 attendees, including children and their parents.

We are happy to announce that Qualifier 3 is now open for the Agile Robotics for Industrial Automation Competition (ARIAC)! ARIAC is a simulation-based competition is designed to promote agility in industrial robot systems by utilizing the latest advances in artificial intelligence and robot planning. The goal is to enable industrial robots on the shop floors to be more productive, more autonomous, and to require less time from shop floor workers.

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Roland Siegwart and Matthias Hüni about Kickstart Accelerator, a Swiss Startup Accelerator. Siegwart leads the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zürich and is one of the initiators of Kickstart Accelerator. Hüni is the vertical lead of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at Kickstart Accelerator and is involved in the program’s operations. Kickstart Accelerator seeks to provide international entrepreneurs with an inlet to the Swiss ecosystem, including connections to industry and academia.

The 2017 second annual robotic art competition with $100,000 in cash prizes is now open for team registration. An international competition for all ages, the contest’s goal is to challenge teams to produce something visually beautiful with robotics—that is, to have a robot use physical brushes and paint to create an artwork. It’s ideal for students or professionals involved in robotic planning and image processing, especially those who have an appreciation for art.

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Torsten Oelkes, Executive Chairman of CUBE, about the CUBE Tech Fair. The CUBE Tech Fair is a conference that takes place in Berlin in May that seeks to facilitate connections between companies. The Tech Fair also features a start up competition where the winner will be awarded €1,000,000 without exchange of equity or debt. In this interview, Toresten talks about CUBE’s business model, the robotic companies they’re affiliated with, the CUBE Tech Fair, and the €1,000,000 prize.

Since the launch of the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco in December 2015, individuals from around the world have been racing to form Teams and develop a range of groundbreaking technologies to access the deep-sea. Registration closed at the end of September 2016 with 32 bold Teams stepping forward to take on the challenge of mapping and imaging our ocean as never before.

Kickstart, one of the largest multi-corporate accelerators, officially launches its second cohort with the inclusion of new regions and verticals, including robotics and intelligent systems

The DOME Project of the Digger Foundation has been shortlisted as finalist of the
prestigious Robotics Award for Good taking place in Dubai in February 2017, where
a $1million price will be awarded to the best competitor among 10
international teams.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Edson Prestes, Professor at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and an organizer of the Humanitarian Robotics and Automation Technology Challenge (HRATC) 2016 competition. The HRATC competition challenges teams around the world to develop methods of controlling robots to detect land mines in large open environments.

Robohub covered the Airbus Shopfloor Challenge that took place during #ICRA16 in Stockholm. Below, you can see an extensive photo gallery as part of our coverage. Check it out!