Humans have become pretty fast at shipping out your items with the help of computers and whips, but soon your items will be at your door a second after you click. Zappos just completed implementation of Kiva Systems’ Mobile Fulfillment System, which will see “a fleet of Kiva’s mobile robotic drive units and inventory storage pods” hit the company’s Kentucky facility. (Robots in Kentucky? Grab the bourbon and the shotgun…Better grab the inflatable sheep too. Could be along and lonely night.) The move is being made to keep the distribution system up to par with a bunch of new products outside of just footwear.
What the duck? The Camerautomata Charlie: Image Digesting Robotic Duck is one weird art project. It’s the project of Taeyoon Choi from South Korea. I’m guessing she has a very strange imagination. But hey, you say pictures come from a duck’s butt, I’m there.
It works like this. The duck is placed in various New York City tourist areas. The duck will then make like a duck and move around by itself and when it senses the flash from a tourist’s camera, he takes his own picture. The photo is then printed from the duck’s ass where you can…pluck it.(See what I did there? Pluck it…) or it can be uploaded to the web via WiFi.
The Robotic Duck was made by hacking a digital camera, printer, a Roomba, and an mp3 player, all connected by a single microcontroller.
You’ve seen the movie, you have the toys, but now you’re looking for a softer Wall-E that you can cuddle right? Well, here’s a warm and fuzzy Wall-E to snuggle at night my strange friend. It will only cost you $19.99.
This robo-instrument has an interesting take on music. It grinds plastic discs against strings, making them resonate and it’s activated by motion sensors. The sound it produces? Let’s just say that it’s almost the sound that Doctor Who’s Tardis makes in flight. Watch the video, you’ll hear it.
Team is doing something about the almost complete lack of robot flash drives, with their “T-Bot R50″ robot-shaped flash drives that were shown off at the Computex event. Looks like they’ll come in 1GB,2GB,4GB and 8GB sizes. You can choose between red, white, blue or black. They have a cool retro look.
Papercraft robots are awesome. It’s the height of Dork art and nerd play. Symantec knows this, which is why they are using it to educate the public on malware bots that can infect their computers. To that end, Symantec has released some free papercraft robots. Brilliant marketing.
Honest to God, I thought the singing Elvis robot from WowWee was history. Turns out that some people just have not had enough of him yet. Instructables user GW Jax has created the Elvinator, which combines “The King” with the Terminator. Which leads to the question: If you’re gonna give the king a terminator upgrade, which is better, Fat or normal elvis? I think fat elvis is much more menacing.
The Elvinator is only halfway finished. So far GW Jax has only given the king burned/melted face and an LED eye. Soon he’ll add a Jaw piston for better mouth movement, give him custom phrases, and make it interactive with voice recognition and the ability to “learn.”
Looks like John Connor has a new problem to worry about.
Norwegian research company, the Sintef Group recently announced that they’ve been working on their own robotic serpents. It doesn’t look as cool as Japan’s latest creepy crawly, but that’s not the point. The point is that the sooner we create completely lifelike robot serpents, the sooner they can inject us with robot made venom. But I’m getting ahead of myself. These robots are designed to slither down complex networks of industrial piping systems where Mario and Luigi won’t go, in order to clear the residue or to repair the broken patches. The snakes are made of aluminum and are 1.5 meters long, lightweight and flexible, so they can slither up even to high altitudes. They can also submerge themselves under fluid. And by fluid, I mean your biological waste included.
WowWee has been talking about it’s all-controlling RoboRemote since CES at the beginning of the year, but it looks like it’s only recently become available, and it’s already been reviewed. According to the good people over at RoboCommunity, the remote delivers on it’s promise to control any IR-based WowWee robot, with the software. (XP/Vista only) It’s easy enough for almost anyone to use, but not so basic that it turn off other robotics enthusiasts. At $20, you pretty much have to give it a try.
