Calling All Robots

IEEE Spectrum is building the world’s largest, coolest robotics catalog. The beta site is at Robots.ieee.org You can read all about it here. It is a very interesting article by Erico Guizzo and Randi Klett.

This will be a great resource for students, and robotics' enthusiasts around the world. The article states...

We want more kids to dream of becoming roboticists and technologists, or at least be sufficiently familiar with the details of the technology to make informed, thoughtful, and ethical decisions in the future. So we need to make real robots just as inspiring as their fictional counterparts, and here at Spectrum, we have a plan to do just that.

Over the past year, we’ve been creating a massive portal for everything robotics, built around a fun and unique dynamic catalog. You can see it right now at Robots.ieee.org. There you’ll find a vast zoo of humanoids, drones, exoskeletons, quadrupeds, and other kinds of automatons, each with its own profile, with photos, videos, curious facts, and technical specifications. (We’re currently in beta, preparing for a full launch next month.)

My only concern is that there was not a single Parallax-made robot on their list. NONE. Not even the venerable BoeBot or original blue Scribbler! Parallax has sold over half a million BoeBots alone! One-time students, who are now the engineers designing the world's most advanced robots, cut their teeth on Parallax's educational robots and learned from Parallax's Stamps In Class materials.

Needless to say, this blogger and Parallax user has submitted a request in the form of a detailed list with links so that this oversight can be addressed.

We will see if IEEE Spectrum is serious about a careful cataloging of robotics history and their call for submissions to this project. I hope they are because this is an exciting and much-needed resource and can be a powerful tool in raising up the next generation of roboticists.