I just stumbled upon RRobots. RRobots is a C-Robots/Robocode clone written entirely in Ruby. RRobots provides an arena in which robots - controlled by user code - compete against each other.
Since the programming language is Ruby, no compilation or linking is required. When you’ve finished coding the robot, you are ready to go. The software makes use of a set of images (turret, body, radar with different orientations, explosions). Amazingly the whole software including graphical visualisation, simulation, and mixin-code for the robots is only 835 lines of code. It uses Ruby-Tk for visualisation. Up to 8 robots can participate in a tournament.
For participating in the Robocup researchers at the institute for simulation and systems optimisation at the Technical University of Darmstadt were using Sony AIBO robots in their Robocup team called the Dribbling Dackels. Sony has discontinued the AIBO project some time ago and finally Oscar von Stryk and his team at TU Darmstadt decided to develop a successor for Sony’s robot dog. The robot is going to be released on the market end of this year but depending on the demand initially it it will probably only be available for Robocup teams. It took six months to develop the robot in collaboration with the Hajime Research Institute (Osaka, Japan) which helped out with the mechanical part.
For designing the casing a professional design company was employed (Gotha Design).
More information on the robot will be available starting from July 7th on the website http://www.thenewrobot.com/.
The IPCC has released its 4th assessment report on climate change. Earlier this year I wrote a critical article about the mainstream belief of global warming being caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases and I don’t want to do it again anytime soon. However I want to point out to anyone who is interested in this topic that in the meantime the Fraser Institute has released the Independent summary for policy makers based on the IPCC report (full report available as PDF).
