Its the annual Robotics Week in the United States, with events scheduled for all 50 states. This is the eighth year Robotics Week has been celebrated.
The second full week in April was officially designated as National Robotics Week by the U.S. House of Representatives, and the event grows in popularity each year. The week was created to highlight the increasing importance of robotics, to inspire students in STEM-related fields and to share the excitement of robotics with audiences of all ages. The event is organized by iRobot with the support of an Advisory Council.
This year sees events in all 50 states, and you can find out more about events in your state on the National Robotics Week website. This years activities range from a robot block party, university open house, to a robotics competition. There are introductory robotics courses for kids, robot demonstrations, and tours of innovative labs and science fairs.
The main competition during RoboWeek is the Create Foundation U.S. Open Robotics Championship. This has grown into one of the largest robotics tournaments in the world, with qualifiers from other robotics tournaments around the world taking part alongside U.S. teams. It has a number of divisions, including an Open Program, High School, Middle School, IQ, and Junior.
It's also worth noting that during National Robotics Week there will be a 10 percent discount on iRobot’s Create 2 Programmable Robot. This is a pre-assembled mobile robot based on the Roomba 600 Series Robot Vacuum that provides an out-of-the-box opportunity for educators, students and developers to program behaviors,sounds, movements and add additional electronics.
Following on from RoboWeek, this year's RoboGames will be taking place in Pleasanton, CA on Apr 27-29, 2018. This will be the 14th annual all-events world championship. RoboGames is described as the Olympics of Robots, and teams of robot makers from around the world to compete in over 50 different events. Competitors including combat robots, fire-fighters, LEGO bots, hockey bots, walking humanoids, soccer bots, sumo bots, and even androids that do kung-fu have entered over the years.
The results of the 2018 Perl Developer Survey are now available. It looks at users of Perl 5 and includes questions on their attitude to Perl 6 and to other languages.
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