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This is big news for private ventures in robotics. The X-Prize foundation and Google have just announced a $30 million prize for private ventures to successfully soft-land a robot rover on the moon, roam for at least 500 meters and send back a 'Mooncast' back to earth (more about this later). We are at Wired's NextFest in Los Angeles and will be uploading some video of the announcement soon. The website for the competition has just been launched here.

Also visit later to see more coverage (Update: video above) including video of Hanson Robotics' Zeno, Tomotaka Takahashi's Chroino, SuperBot and more! ... continued