The Department of Defense's research arm, the Defense Advance Research Project Agency (DARPA), has announced their latest challenge: build a robotic car that can traverse through urban settings for 60 miles in 6 hours. The challenge is designed to encourage research for the development of autonomous ground vehicles for use on the battlefield.

In the 2005 challenge, several cars successfully drove autonomously 175 miles through the Mojave desert. This year, the challenge is to drive through city environments, including understanding street signals, and merging into traffic safely.

This picture shows last year's winner, Stanford University's VW Toureg vehicle, named "Stanley".

Alexander Van de Rostyne built Pixelito, a 6.9 gram remote-control helicopter. Pixelito is fully functional, with 4 channels of control via infra red. It has no servos and no swashplate. The swashplate is the mechanism that allows the spinning blades to be tilted forward or back or side to side, allowing the pilot to control where the helicopter goes. (link from Stocktrader).

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Professor Howie Choset of Carnegie Mellon University and his team have built this robotic snake.

More advanced versions could crawl through collapsed buildings to locate survivors. The remote-controlled machines are designed to carry cameras and electronic sensors. The current version is already capable of climbing up and around pipes.

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Raffaello D'Andrea built this robotic chair that falls completely apart (the legs and back detach and fall away), then crawls around and puts itself back together. Go to the link and check out the video. Not to be confused with the walking chair.

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Bummer! I saw George's Vlosich III's amazing Etch-A-Sketch art on several blogs and was planning to make a robot to control an Etch-A-Sketch. I'd even spent some time thinking about the drawing algorithm. Looks like Scott Ferguson is way ahead of me and has already done this. His setup is very clean, and allows control of Etch-A-Sketch's of different sizes.

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The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has developed an ultralight robotic aircraft that mimics the navigational abilities of a fly. The plane is completely autonomous, weighs 10 grams and has a 14 inch wingspan. It is designed to fly indoors, which is difficult because of the many potential obstacles. It can fly around a room completely unassisted for nearly five minutes.

The plane contains low-resolution "eyes", a tiny gyroscope and an onboard computer.

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Mechanical Engineers from Carnegie Mellon University built a robot that can sprint across water. The robot was built to emulate the motions of the basilisk lizard, an iguana that lives in the rain forests of Central and South America.

The inventors imagine a day when a more developed version of the robot could be equipped with biochemical sensors that monitor water quality; be deployed with cameras for spying, search-and-rescue or exploration; or be outfitted with bacteria to break down pollutants.

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Pictures of cars being assembled on an assembly line in Volkswagon's Dresden factory.

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Quickplacer (a high-performance handling robot) is the most rapid in the world. Its high acceleration and braking capacity is 5 times that of a Formula 1 racing car.

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