Online I host the Robot Party. It’s a Google+ Hangout for robot builders from all around the world to join in and share their robots. We have had people stream video from their quadcopters, and a university lab participating in the DARPA challenge join in. There is even a 5 year old girl who joined and will be showing some of the robots that she has been working on with her parents.

It’s a real great celebration of robots - from 3 million dollar projects to fun $3 ones. We call ourselves the Robot Party Rockstars.

I have been working on a project called the Rapidly Deployable Automation System. The idea is to have robots that are reconfigurable, and can blend their actions with adjacent cells. Leading to less downtime if one robot fails. Instead of the objects around us being stationary, we could set up some robots to help move objects around in an automated way.

The moonshot of this idea is to eventually be used in natural disaster settings. The robots could be deployed to help move things around, dig troughs to improve water flow. Being able to add automation to any task in any environment.

Right now it is just the start, it’s a long project. I’m releasing the major design updates as open source hardware so everyone can learn about it.

RoboGames would be the perfect place to demo my project and have a Robot Party LIVE.

RoboGames is the olympics of robots. There are robot makers from many different countries, and it will be amazing to see what I can learn from the ways they create their robots. The cross-pollination of ideas and skills is one of a kind. There are no guarantees that the event will happen next year.

One of the ideas I want to try after RoboGames is a local mini robo-olympic event involving water. Since Kingston is known for its olympic water events, it would be a great place for it. This could be accomplished by having local workshops on building robots, helping more people to get started in robotics.