Without a Traceroute

There were a lot of robots at Roboexotica, and I didn’t have a chance to get good photos of all of them, or the alcohol tolerance to sample all of their creations, but here’s some more.

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!

This is RoboVox, a giant statue of a robot standing outside the gallery where Roboexotica is being held. I saw a talk by his creator, and he admitted that RoboVox is “more of a monument than a robot,” but it’s still pretty impressive and imposing. The “vox” part comes in because there’s a special phone number you can send a text message to, and the robot’s eyes and mouth will light up and it will read your text out in a booming, synthesized robot-voice. If anyone wants to mess with random Austrian passersby, RoboVox will be up at least until this Sunday, and you can send a text to: (0043)68110679782. Watch out though, international texts can be pricey. Oh, and I’ve already made it say “All your base are belong to us!”

Mmm…snacks

This bot carries snacks it the plastic tub it carries. I think it has the ability to roam around a room, but it was stationary when I saw it. If you approached the bot and moved or made noise, it would light up and open the lid on the snack container. The snacks have changed over the week I’ve been here, but they were mostly pretty standard bar-fare: pretzels, chips (aka “crisps”), bugles, etc..

"The future of cherry-serving robotics"

These were two little crane-like robots created by Bre Pettis to put cherries into cocktail glasses. The retro-aficionados out there will recognize the controllers as Atari 2600 joysticks. Using a controller with only a two-axis joystick and one button to control a bot with 6 different servo motors was pretty tricky The button cycled through different modes, with each joystick axis controlling two servos in each mode, but it was really not intuitive and took some work to manipulate the cherry into your cocktail glass. Usually, two users would race against other with the winner being awarded vodka in their cherry-glass. The children in this photo got soda instead.