We love and fear robots, but sometimes it doesn’t seem like they heart us back. At this year’s SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, Taisuck Kwon (from the Kyushu Institute of Design) demonstrated his latest work in the realm of “photo real” robots: robots designed to reproduce facial expressions of human beings.

The photo real robots convey emotions with facial features designed to put people at ease, “especially seniors and toddlers.” And though the robots have an underlying mechanical configuration that mimics the muscle structure of the human face, complete with servomotors and actuators used to manipulate “muscles” beneath the “skin”, they just seem to look even more creepy. If I weren’t too busy warning all of you about them, I would run like hell. I do my duty. Plus I’m waiting patiently for more realistic sex robots. Once we reach that plateau, I’ll have my way with a few robot babes, take one with me and head for the hills.

[National Geographic]

Lego Education and National Instruments have developed an interactive robotics kit for kids at the elementary school level. The kit will let students learn the basics of robotics programming with its built in NI LabVIEW software that gives them an easy interface. It describes complex robotics technology in the simplest possible way. Let a new future of geeks and robots begin.

[i4u]

Humanoid bots are getting even more super impressive as each day goes by. This video shows the Darmstadt Dribblers team in action at the recent 2008 Robocup. Thing is, they’re really playing like a soccer team, just well, a lot slower. This is the first year that three-on-three playing has taken place, using info exchange over Wi-Fi. You just have to watch. So watch.

[Youtube]

Our favorite makers of home robots, iRobot, won’t be satisfied until one of their creations kills us dead at home under the guise of cleaning or tidying up. One day your local police will have a special RV unit. That stands for Robotics Victim.

Anywho, iRobot knows that the grass is always greener with a robot mowing it. That’s why they filed a iPatent for a lawn-mowing robot. It’s an 84-page filing with a variety of configurations, even an all-electric model and gas-electric hybrid. Some have acoustic and optical sensors that would seem to allow the robot to “avoid hard surfaces, water and other barriers”. Look, I’m on board with any bot you wanna put in my home. All I ask is that it’s aware of the fact that my heart pulled through my chest will kill me dead. Well, that and I want it to not be thrilled with that image.

[Slipperybrick]

It ain’t pretty, but it gets the job done. What you see is a bunch of polymorph plastic, curtain rods, electric screwdrivers, and motors. Wooden sockets and curtain rings are the hip joints. Knee joints are kept moving with four motors, while a bunch of bungee cords and strings serve as muscles and tendons. The electric screwdrivers provide power for rotation. It looks small but the legs are 26-inches tall by themselves. It’s still in the making. Hit the link for more.

[Hacked Gadgets]

Tired of digging and enlisting friends and family just to get story on it’s way to fame? Just use a Digg arm like this one. I’m not sure if this is fake or not, but a cool idea anyway. It refreshes a page, detects Digg badges on the screen, then moves the cursor over them to “manually” Digg the stories. Supposedly the bot can Digg 1500 stories in a day. Watch the video below. Definitely a fake. I’m gonna need more evidence on this one.
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I Robot may have been a crap movie as far as robot movies go. It didn’t resemble any of Isaac Asimov’s robot stories, but Sonny at least looked kinda cool and different.

Now you can own Sonny’s head. And the way I see it, the more robot heads you decorate your dwelling with, the safer you will be come the day of robo-reckoning. They’ll see all your trophies and go kill someone else.

This head features the same opaque outer housing as the NS-5 robots from the film and you can remove the back of Sonny’s head to see his brain which glows with a set of blue LEDs. It’s powered by a 9-volt battery and is available for about $130.

[Funshop]

Engineers everywhere seem to be teaming up with biologists so they can mimic and learn from nature and eventually kill us all dead with robo-bugs and such. Anette Hosoi is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Her RoboSnail is inspired by the real slimy snail.

The slimy stuff on a snails’ underbelly was what she was interested in. It allows the snail to move in any direction and on almost any surface, so why not model a bot after the disgusting specimen. She describes the snail as “nature’s all-terrain vehicle” and I guess she was right. RoboSnail can climb up walls and even stick to ceilings. The Robot is made up of movable segments that ripple over synthetic snail funk. It should come in handy for those hard to reach places you want to leave slime on.

You know if I eventually die at the hands of a robosnail instead of say a Terminator, I’m gonna be pretty disappointed.

[CNN]

This little guy looks like he was cobbled together with a bunch of spare parts. it’s got a portable megaphone for talking and sports distance sensors so that it knows the location of pedestrians and how far away they are. That way he won’t get trampled over and he knows when to use the portable microphone at the right time. It has the ability to meet and greet people in half a dozen official languages of the United Nations.

That’s the way it goes. The small ones spread peace, while the big ones will gun you down.

[Make]

Who da man? Uman…u. U da man. The Uman robot is pretty impressive. It’s bots like this that will have us crying in a corner while our fellow humans are getting disemboweled nearby, in no time at all. It was developed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, ad UMan stands for UMass Mobile Manipulator. It’s an intelligent robot capable of teaching itself how to use objects it has never encountered before. When you think about it that’s pretty amazing. I can’t get my grandmother to figure out a cell phone.

With a plain old webcam, UMan analyzes differences between side by side pixels and pokes an object around in an attempt to figure out its shape and how it moves. UMan then uses that information to figure out how to manipulate the object.

Frightening? Hell yes. Hit the link for a creepy video and then pack up and head for the mountains.

[Technologyreview]