Abstract--This paper describes the development of a costeffective yet precise indoor robot navigation system composed of a custom robot controller board and an indoor positioning system. First, the proposed robot controller board has been specially designed for emerging IoT-based robot applications and is capable of driving two 6-Amp motor channels. Then, working together with the robot controller board, the proposed positioning system detects the robot's location using a down-looking webcam and uses the robot's position on the webcam images to estimate the real-world position of the robot in the environment. The positioning system can then send commands via WIFI to the robot in order to steer it to any arbitrary location in the environment. Our experiments show that the proposed system reaches a navigation error smaller or equal to 0.125 meters while being more than two orders of magnitude more cost-effective compared to off-the-shelve motion capture (MOCAP) positioning systems.

RoboCup is an initiative to promote research in robotics through standardized competition and cooperation. The RoboCup Humanoid League focuses on legged robots between 0.4–1 metres tall in the KidSize and 1–2 metres tall in AdultSize. This year the Hamburg Bit-Bots performed a survey of all KidSize teams participating in the RoboCup 2022 in Bangkok, Thailand. We aimed to capture the state of the art in the league. This article gives a summary of the results.

An eccentric inventor has created a bizarre four-legged robot that allows snakes to'walk'. Allen Pan, a Los Angeles-based engineer and YouTuber, created the device out of a long tube and four plastic legs connected to a controller board. Footage shows a snake curiously poking its head out the end of the device as it's serenely transported around the room. Pan, who posted a video blog of his project to YouTube, said he wanted to'give snakes back their legs'. Around 150 million years ago, snakes had visible legs, but they evolved to lose them, thought to be due to a genetic mutation.