Robot-Specific Sites

BEAM Online

Web Site: http://www.beam-online.com/

Next to Solarbotics.net, BEAM Online is the site you'll want on your radar if you're interested in keeping up with this fascinating area of robotics. The site offers project tutorials, papers (well, at least one really good one detailing how the common BEAM Bicore circuit works), BEAM schematics, a BEAM FAQ, a robot gallery, and much more. The site also contains a search engine to over 40 BEAM Web sites.

Battlebots

Web Site: http://www.battlebots.com/

If you're interested in combat robotics, especially Battlebots, this site offers some great resources. It has the full Battlebots rules, profiles of builders and their bots, information and rankings for all Battlebot competitions (from Long Beach 1999 to season 4 on Comedy Central), video clips, some robot-building tutorials, and a store of Battlebots-related books, toys, and other goodies. The creators of Battlebots have also started Battlebots IQ, a high school curriculum that uses robotic competition to teach kids about engineering, design, math, logic, and problem solving. Details and sample curricula are available through the Battlebots site.

Honda Humanoid Project

Web Site: world.honda.com/robot/

This official Honda site covers both the P-series robot project and its younger sibling ASIMO. Here you'll find background on the two bots, specs, and movies. The careful reader will notice that on the spec sheets for ASIMO, it says that the "Control Unit" is a wireless connection and the "Operating Section" is a "workstation and portable controller." In other words, a remote brain and a remote control that few people seem to know about. ASIMO is basically a multi-million dollar, high-tech puppet.