Dottocomu has a pretty interesting story today about the ROBO-ONE contest being held in Japan.  The annual event features bipedal robots in a tournament that gets the attention and imagination of many enthusiasts who watch their creations tear each other apart.  The contest has a captive audience that is eager to watch robots with creative names fight each other, inspiring new strategies and designs every year.  One of the notable fans in the 2004 edition of the competition is Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, who autographed one of the robots on display in Tokyo.

Notes:

1- San Francisco held earlier this year (March 20th and 21st 2004) the Robolympics event.  Even on that occasion, Japanese and Korean robo-one models delighted the crowd.  The Korean entry in particular was interesting, as its robo-one had a vision system that enabled it to track and kick a tennis ball.

2- All this robot talk has gotten me to be a bit sentimental... I vividly remember watching the famous MIT 2.70 robot design competition, which has now been renamed the 2.007 Contest (part of the old "Introduction to Design" course, whose number used to be 2.70 in the MIT course catalog, and recently has been re-labelled "Design & Manufacturing I", or course 2.007 for short).

3- I did not have a chance to catch "I, Robot" yet, but Yahoo! users seem to have given it a B+ rating, better than the movie critics (B-).  Any opinions are welcome...