Robot Group at ArmadilloCon 2007

As always, Robot Group — an Austin robotics organization — demoed their creatures at the ArmadilloCon. If I understood correctly, they made this purple alien as a prop for a very cheap and cheesy movie, but they did not complete it, and it doesn’t do very much. Well, its eyes move.

I remember the Robot Group people telling me what this was, but… as the convention wears on, my powers of retention degrade exponentially. Anyway, this grey alien’s mouth tentacles moved.

A little brown robot walks it sits down, gets up, tries to walk some more, but mostly just teeters in place, hardly making any progress.

A 1 minute, 14 second video of this cute little robot attempting to walk is below.

Spinning letters above the Robot Group table in the dealer room

Robot Group creations: the brain and the Compassionator (right).

In the video below, The Compassionator (held by its creator on the right), shoots at the little robot on the floor. If I understood correctly, it was named the Compassionator because it doesn’t shoot to kill: rather, it sends beams of compassion. Or something like that.

Here is a still from the video above: the creator of Compassionator points it at a little robot driving around on the floor and shoots the beams of compassion. The beams are purely imaginary and not visible in the video.

A 2-year-old congoer is intrigued by Eric Lundquist’s (right) robot.

From the side, Eric Lundquist’s robot kind of looks like a rolling cart for toys, electronics, and what-not.