robo-one

No, it's not an oxymoron. The MIT school calendar consists not only of the usual Fall and Spring semesters but an optional mini-semester lasting the month of January called the IAP (IAP). During this time, students have the option of hibernating through the cooold New England winter or trying out hundreds of fun classes/activities like building loudspeakers, dark chocolate tasting, belly-dancing and glass-blowing. Robot competitions such as MasLab and 6.270 also feature in January. This past IAP, another robot-building offering was the Roboone Workshop where students had the opportunity to tinker with a KHR 2HV!

Robo-one is an amazing bipedal robot competition that is rapidly growing in popularity. It began in Japan but has spread to other countries like Korea. It pits tiny humanoid robots against each other in combat and skills' demonstrations. Competitors use modified commercial hobby robots such as the Robonova (Hitec, Korea) and KHR (Kondo, Japan). Look at these videos in particular:

• OmniZero.4 climbing a ladder and jump-roping on YouTube
• Combat on YouTube
• Slicing a swiss-roll cake

The event seems to have been so entertaining, no one was watching the Robo-one Girls. ... continued