By Alex Villafania
INQUIRER.net

STUDENTS from Grace Christian High School and the Philippine Science High School will lead the Philippine contingent for the upcoming 2007 World Robot Olympiad to be held in Taipei, Taiwan.

The students from the two schools were the top winners during the recently held 6th Philippine Robotics Olympiad at the Alabang Town Center in Muntinlupa City. They beat 69 other schools to become the country’s representatives for the 2007 WRO.

Winning in the elementary level is Grace Christian High School “Team A” composed of Carlos Cheng, Jordan Chua and Kyle David Dee, with their coach Warren John Ong. They won the Best in Robo Rally category, as well as the Best of the Best category.

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By Alex Villafania
INQUIRER.net

MOST people would still think that making robots feel is within the realm of science fiction, but few know that science is better than fiction. A young and upbeat Filipino scientist, John John Cabibihan, is paving the way to making robots “feel.”

In scientific terms, it is called “tactile sensing,” the detection and measurement of physical objects through contact. It is a subset of the general research on robotics, particularly with artificial limbs. Tactile sensing gives these machines the ability to feel objects in the real world.

Tactile sensing is also subset field of bionics (or biomimetics), which is generally a study to imitate natural systems and their subsequent artificial application.

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SCIENTISTS are testing a robot in one of the world’s deepest sinkholes, which happens to be located in El Zacaton, Mexico.

Here’s an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times story:

EL ZACATON, MEXICO–NASA is testing a robot in one of Earth’s deepest sinkholes in a first step toward searching for life on Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa.

El Zacaton, near the Gulf Coast of northeastern Mexico, is about 328 feet wide and 1,000 feet deep. Over the next two weeks, scientists plan to map and take samples in the dark, water-filled fissure with the 1.5-ton DEPTHX robot. It’s a prelude to the proposed navigation of Europa’s ice-capped oceans in about 20 years.

THINK they’ll induct Voltes V, Mazinger Z and Daimos? Or how about the Transformers, heh

Check out this excerpt from a CNET News.com story:

Aside from its Robot Hall of Fame, CMU has unique outreach projects to engage mainstream America with robots. It has hosted RoboCup, a global soccer tournament played by robots, and most recently released DIY robot recipes that allow anyone to make robots from off-the-shelf parts through its Terk program. The people behind CMU’s unique Robotics Institute have also become a hot topic for analysis since the release of a nonfiction book about them by Lee Gutkind.

On Tuesday, Matt Mason, the director of the Robotics Institute at CMU announced the 2007 inductees into the Robot Hall of Fame. The honor, which is judged by a jury of both leading science and science fiction experts, was created in April 2003 to call attention to the contributions robots and their creators make to society.