For those of you--and unfortunately that includes most of us--who were unable to get over to Europe during European Robotics Week 2013, November 25th to December 1, you missed quite a show. Just perusing the event list on the Internet was a daunting task! Imagine attending over 300 events across the continent, from an educational reach-out titled "Robots are Coming-Are You Ready?" in Helsinki, Finland on the north to a robotics workshop in Nicosia, Cyprus on the south; and from a lab tour and workshop in Ankara, Turkey near the Black Sea, to an event in Mayo, Ireland in the Atlantic called the "First Lego League Event 21".

The one show this blogger would have wanted to experience if he could have convinced his employer to pay the freight was the biomimetic robot "SafariEU" on November 27th in the London Science Museum. Quoting from an article discussing the show, "visitors can trek through the un-natural habitat of these robots, interacting with creatures that swim, flap, and crawl, in a unique safari experience." No kidding! Biomimetics, by the way, is the study of the structure and function of biological systems as models for the design and engineering of materials and machines--robots in this case.

Chief among the biomimetic robots we’d like to see in action is the STIFF-FLOP, a flexible, snake-like robot built to wiggle and worm its way into the human body with the facility and alacrity of a tapeworm--preferably at the behest of a patient while controlled by a doctor!

Alas, Robot Week Europe ended a few days ago and we are going to have to put off seeing the STIFF-FLOP in action until sometime in April, 2014.  That’s the start for our own National Robotics Week here in the USA and we gotta believe it will show up at one of the events! So be there!

We want to see some biomimetic robots in classrooms! Any volunteers to teach with a cockroach educational robot?