BOMBS, BOOBS & BURGERS

This year's Robobusiness conference was hella cool (are the kids still saying "hella?" Did they ever?). I did an interview with Radio New Zealand's This Way Up program from the show, talking about the various goings-on there. Here's a link to the show's page and a direct link to the interview if you'd like to listen.

One of the highlights was learning about South Korea's plans for Robotland, a theme park devoted to, you guessed it, robots. The park is costing governments and private investors $700 million and is scheduled to open in 2012, depending of course on how this whole economic crisis goes. The official site is in Korean but you can get an idea of what it's going to look like from the pictures (more info in English can be found here). The point of the park is to spur investment in robots, a market South Korea is going after fiercely. The government wants to grow the country's share of the global robot market from the current 8% to 20% by 2018. To do so, it has actually enacted a law that requires businesses to consider robots when making budgetary decisions. Given that they're already way ahead of North America in terms of broadband and mobile technology, I'm wondering if we all might be bowing down to our South Korean masters and eating kimchi some day soon?

In other news, check out this short video I put together showing off a pair of very different robots at the show. The first is Foster-Miller's MAARS explosive disposal robot (and weapons platform), while the other is Ugobe's pet dinosaur, the Pleo. You couldn't find two more dissimilar robots.