You know what they say. It ain’t over till the fat-bottomed robots start shopping. Or something like that. Robot developer tmsuk has unveiled a remote-control robot that will give you a new way to shop from the comfort of home. It’s a prototype of the telerobotic shopper, which is a modified TMSUK-4 humanoid robot with a variety of cellphone communications technology. They had a demonstration on July 10 at the Izutsuya department store in the city of Kitakyushu, Japan, where it probably made the male robot wait while it tried on clothes and asked if each one made it look fat.

In the demonstration scenario, an unwell grandmother unable to go shopping with her granddaughter sent the robot to do it for her. Using an NTT DoCoMo video-capable cellphone, the grandmother controlled the robot and did some shopping enjoy the shopping through the robot’s camera eyes.

See, I ain’t buying this. A grandmother who can use a cell phone AND a robot? The woman maneuvered the robot to the hat section, eyed what was available, and had her granddaughter model a few for her before deciding which one to purchase.

Great. Pretty soon the rich will robots in my way as I try to buy stuff to justify my meatsack existence.

[Pink Tentacle]

The tardis is flying out of out control. It was driven off course by an unknown force. Finally it lands. Ah, 19th century London. As you exit the door, you’re pleased to see that it all looks about right…Until you see one of these. Then another. And another. Something is very wrong with this time-line. But even as your brain processes the danger, you can’t help but admire the workmanship. You notice it has wheels, so they won’t be climbing any stairs again. Nothing else to do, but go have your adventure.

Can you believe this thing? It’s a model from Alex Holden. He modded the hell out of a bottle of Dalek bubble bath to create this beauty, adding all kinds of awesome Dalek detail.

[Alex Holden] VIA [Slipperybrick]

Care-O-bot 3 is one of the weirder looking robots we’ve seen recently. The 4-foot-8-inch robot is built to “relieve us of heavy, dirty, monotonous or irksome tasks.” It was developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA. With a single arm that has only three fingers, it was specifically made to serve drinks and perform other similar tasks.

It’s equipped with laser scanners, a nifty 3-D range camera, even stereo-vision color cameras which allow the robot to identify various objects. For instance, it doesn’t know the particular shape of a bottle, but when you place it in the bot’s hand it will form a 3D rendering of it for future use. Of course it’s fingers have sensors which prevent it from gripping fragile items too hard. It won’t run you over either thanks to it’s unique 3D perception of the environment. It recognizes movement which stops the robot from moving.

Sounds like it wants to do all my chores and serve me. But it looks like it wants to suck me into it’s huge body. Yes, it’s look scares me. I mean it looks like a guy in a robot suit. Probably a crazy killer.

[Physorg]

Someone known as ScreamyGuy built this fractal robot scene. Pretty neat.

“I built a robot whose sole purpose in life was to create an even smaller robot just like himself… So much like himself, that this robot endeavored to create yet another tiny robot, ad infinitum. This continued for a while until an extremely tiny speck of robot tried to endow purpose upon a cloud of molecules with ruinous result.”

On the site, you can view the bots from many angles as well as zoom in on smaller and smaller bots that are working on other bots.

Yeah, but what if you catch one looking back at you?

[Screamyguy]

An experiment, conducted by neuroscientists at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, involving a pair of macaque monkeys with electrodes implanted in their brains, have the monkeys operating a robot arm like it was their own. They are even able to feed themselves much of the time, which is pretty impressive.

Research has been going on since 2000 and a similar break through occurred in 2003, but now they were able to make a monkey walk on a treadmill at Duke University and control the motions of another robot in Japan. This could lead to a breakthrough in prosthetics, where the user might train himself to close a prosthetic hand by shrugging his shoulder, and the brain will adapt, with the shrug motion eventually becoming second nature.

Or monkeys and robots might team up and give us a Terminator/Planet Of The Apes future.

Great for prosthetics, but it could also apply to normal people controlling machines with their minds in the future, whether your car or computer.

[Popular Mechanics]