They were also at the American Open in Georgia! It was amusing seeing so many other girls, since in the past there have only been 1-2 girls per team, though it's interesting that many times that one girl turns out to be the student team leader (as is the case for the CMU legged team CMPack, the Ohio University small-sized team RoboCats and the JHU mid-sized team Smokin' Jays).

As for random useless info, if you read in the credits of Tekkotsu, it talks about the specific dogs they were developed on, and also lists Ethan Tira-Thompson as the "Grand Poobah of Architecture and Manipulation". This past November, Ethan got engaged to Sylvia Arifin in an interesting way using these dogs. If you read the story, you'll find the names of these very same dogs as major players of the proposal.

More useless info about dorky proposals coming out of the CMU labs. Colin McMillen, who is on the CMU legged team, had a dorky proposal himself last August. It was even listed in Wikipedia under online proposals, though it didn't involve the robot dogs this time.

It's great to read:

1) An encouraging story about women in engineering, and

2) Some interesting insight from an insider. Thanks, JLIN!

Best of luck to Team Spelbot!