The San Jose Convention Center was weekend home to all manner of automata, battlebots, humanoids, people-detecting contraptions, a blinking mechanical giraffe, an Eight Foot Astronaut and more Roombas than I could keep track of. David Fine and Jake Appelbaum accompanied me on the trek from San Francisco to the South Bay for RoboNexus 2005.

Robot Labs was there, with multiple, 30cm incarnations of Pirkus mingling about the hall. Pirkus is, perhaps, the most charismatic metal chassis mini-humanoid bot I've seen.

David befriending a purple Pirkus:

Parallax unleashed their full catalog of Boe-Bots to crawl, roll and blink at the crowd. David and Jake picked up Boe-Bot Robot kits. These are an excellent beginner's package, containing a BASIC Stamp 2 and the Board of Education with its full coterie of IO, servo connects, power and breadboarding options.

Among the many makers of robots were also many makers of hardware for robotics. Virtus Advanced Sensors showed me an incredible 3-axis spatial movement tracker, a small disc less than 2cm across extruding a tiny 0.5cm antenna. Any movement of the sensor in X, Y or Z will be detected and reported, wirelessly. I'd love to strap some of these at various joint locations and dance, sending all the data into Max/MSP/Jitter. Imagine: realtime synthesis based on body movement, plus video control of anything you like, including direct avatars. Wear one as a third eye and head-bobbing becomes backbeat. Virtual instruments could be constructed based on nothing but the incoming stream of performance data from a sensor-laden, mechanically functional but electronically inert physical device. You could play a Rube Goldbergian machine whose brain is actually in your laptop. Virtus is currently looking for a fabrication deal on the chips... someone bring these to market in volume!

Also on display was the Phidgets stable, with a 360 degree booth of cool interface and detector technology. I'm interested in trying some of these devices with Max/MSP to turn my studio into a truly interactive zone, a living beast merging with and extending the humans within. For direct instrument interfacing the bend/torque controller was hot. I was also impressed by their multi-level pressure pads.

David had a good time tweaking the Phidgets PSI sensor:

After seeing all these robots and tools for making more robots, I'm convinced homo sapiens' time here is limited. In fact, you will probably be working for a robot in the near future. By this time next week, the mechs will run everything.

I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.