Here’s a cute little robot toy that won’t break the bank at less than $10 bucks. Zibits are miniature robots that look like a lot of fun to play with on your desktop. In all, there will be 12 different robot designs for to collect. These guys stand about 2.5″ tall and have light-up LED eyes.
Yeah, cyborg beetles. RC cyborg beetles. It’s the work of a team at UC Berkley, who have successfully wired beetles up with electrodes, allowing them to be enslaved remotely.
“We demonstrated the remote control of insects in free flight via an implantable radioequipped miniature neural stimulating system,” the team reported in a paper titled Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. “The pronotum mounted system consisted of neural stimulators, muscular stimulators, a radio transceiver-equipped microcontroller and a microbattery.”
Guess who is sponsoring their work. DARPA of course. Soon wars may be fought with wave upon wave of cyborg beetles, with the enemy crying, “Get it off me! Dear god, get it off me!”
This RC van transforms into fire-breathing robot. It’s from Wicked Evolution and weighs in at 750-pounds. The beast is capable of transforming into a 6.5-foot tall, fire-breathing robot that will flame broil human meat without a second thought.
It uses hydraulics and linear actuators to transform. Now, if you could only fit a human inside…That could be a fun ride.
Check out these WALL-E RC toys. The Mini M-O goes forward, back and side to side and measures 3/4 x 1 x 1″. The infrared controller can also be used for storage. He Takes 3AAA batteries. And so he won’t get lonely, there’s also a Wall-E version measuring 2 3/8′ x 2 3/8 x 2″.
[Amazon] VIA [Robot Snob]
The Robini-i has all of the usual programmable stuff, but this guy also includes playing field accessories for real-world matches and connects to an online community. It sports 16 sensors and four processors, and will wander around on its own, or you can control it.
You can program it using Windows software and a USB hookup. You can program moods, reaction to stimuli, and if it freaks out or is friends when it meets other robots. The $250 starter kit is available on September 28. Best of all this bot is geared toward playing video games with other robots.
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Here’s a cool RC robot from Bandai, called the Heli Robot. Yeah, I’ll buy one when robots fly. Oh wait… It will be released in Japan soon and at that time we assume that the Japanese skies will be filled with tiny robots. We don’t have any specs on this guy, but it beats a crappy model airplane. Cause it’s a robot.
Check out this video of a modified RC plane that has been outfitted with rocket launchers and a camera. I’m not sure his neighbors appreciate this, but we sure do.
“I did some air to ground rocket launching with remote video from the airplane. I also let the kids on the ground do their best to shoot me down using air bust fireworks. Made a great 4th of July. “
We wish we had been there.
Tony Hawk is the past. Robots on skateboards are the future. They can do things that Tony Hawk can only dream of. But until that day comes, all we have is this toy. The X-Skate can hit jumps and move forward, backward left and right under infrared control.
It has a ways to go before surpassing Tony Hawk, but it’s a start. £20 or $32.
Here’s a perfect replica of the popular Scope Dog Turbo Custom seen in the episode of the same name. The included controller lets you make Scope Dog roller dash and fire his machine gun. If you have a second player, you can wage war with each other. The machine guns fire infrared rays that the other mecha will respond to, and you’ll hear the controller make sounds and vibrate if you’re hit.
We like TOMY’s tiny Robo-Q bots. We weren’t sure if they would be get a whole lot of attention though and build a fan base. But Tomy being the smart company that it is, has a marketing plan for the Robo-Q robots that involves the transformers.
It makes sense. Why not make them into all kinds of popular brands. I’d like to see a Terminator version.
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 Robots are a fact of life. Soon they will kill us. We’d like to document the coming apocalypse. |
