Robot Fighter Jet Makes First Flight

Northrop Grumman’s sexily badass X-47B unmanned combat air system made its first flight ever on Friday, circling a desert runway a couple times all by itself before successfully not crashing. Northrop seemed pretty happy about the way things went:

Robot Fighter Jet Makes First Flight

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Pay Attention To This Advertising Robot, Or Get Run Over

Yeah, it’s cute now ’cause this is the first one, but unlike a super annoying person, you can’t necessarily just tell a super annoying robot to leave you alone and rely on it to a.) understand you and b.) care. ‘There’s no getting away from an offer this good,’ huh? You fill me with dread, Alpha Romeo.

Pay Attention To This Advertising Robot, Or Get Run Over

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Robot Sumo Finals Are Impossibly Fast

Here in the US, we’re used to robot sumo happening at an, um, relaxing pace. Not so in Japan, as you can see in this vid. It’s from the 2010 All Japan Robot Sumo Finals, specifically the human-driven competition. Unsurprisingly, due to the pace of the match, the robots themselves are doing a lot of the thinking:

Robot Sumo Finals Are Impossibly Fast

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Kinect Teleoperated Robot Does Pushups For You

Exercise is much less work if you can pawn the hard stuff off on a teleoperated robot. The system in this video is kinda like the physical master/slave system that we saw last year, combined with Willow Garage’s PR2 Kinect demo. While I’m sure this technology has at least a few practical uses, I’m personally hoping that all those humanoid robot competitions will start requiring Kinect teleoperation. Just imagine how much more entertaining it would be to watch robot combat and wildly gesticulating humans at the same time, kinda like this. And you know what, that sounds cool enough that maybe it should be made into a movie or something…

Kinect Teleoperated Robot Does Pushups For You

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Stay home, send robot

Will 2011 be the year of the robot avatar? I have my doubts. But it's definitely a nifty niche product—a way to have more-natural business meetings without flying everybody to one, central location, and without having to confine the meeting to a specialized teleconference room. Inevitable downside: When your boss starts expecting your avatar to show up, even when you're sick or on vacation.

Stay home, send robot

Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/WbEpW9sKzbA/stay-home-send-robot.html

Polar Bears Rage On Robot Spycams

To film up close and personal with polar bears, the BBC (who knows a thing or two about making nature shows) decided that it would be kinda cool to deploy an entire fleet of little remote controlled, robotic cameras:

Polar Bears Rage On Robot Spycams

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Japan’s Robot Safety Center Thinks It Can Protect You

Robots are potentially dangerous, but it’s usually hard to tell just how dangerous they are. You can make up as many ludicrous warnings as you want, but the only way to tell for sure is to let the robots just beat on people a whole bunch and see how bad it gets. At least that way, you get a worst-case scenario.

Japan’s Robot Safety Center Thinks It Can Protect You

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Humanoid Robot Balances Itself Like You Do

This robot (you might recognize it, it’s an HRP-2) has been programmed to NOT AVOID OBSTACLES. I know, crazy right? Instead, it’s smart enough to either move obstacles out of its way when it needs to, or actually use obstacles to help it get around, as you can see in the vid above. The system breaks [...]

Humanoid Robot Balances Itself Like You Do

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World’s First Badminton Robot

This video of what claims to be the world’s first badminton robot suffers from a serious lack of robots playing badminton, but from the few peeks that it offers of what this robot actually does, it seems pretty cool.

World’s First Badminton Robot

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Black Ghost Knifefish Robot Unmasks Movement Secrets

runMobileCompatibilityScript('myExperience719095342001', 'anId');brightcove.createExperiences(); Borrowing biological designs from the black ghost knifefish, engineers have built a swimming robot that reveals how the animal’s trick of vertical movement works. Called GhostBot, the robot copies the real fish’s undulating, ribbon-like [...]

Black Ghost Knifefish Robot Unmasks Movement Secrets

Backlink: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/robot-fish-ribbon-fin/

Hungry rats vs. a scary-looking LEGO robot

Fear is like hot porridge. Too much is bad. Not enough is bad. You want that balance to be just right. The amygdala is the part of the brain tasked with job of playing Goldilocks. If it's overactive, you'll end up a quivering ball of uselessness. If it's missing, you'll be an action-movie badass—right up until the point where you get yourself killed.

Hungry rats vs. a scary-looking LEGO robot

Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/6ZZh1_6v8Yw/hungry-rats-vs-a-sca.html

Shape-shifting robot can grip differently-shaped items

Video link. The Jambot is a shape-changing robotic prototype being developed by a team led by University of Chicago Physicist Heinrich Jaeger and his group through a DARPA initiative. Also involved is iRobot, the company best known for the Roomba. He and [colleague Eric] Brown have designed a gripper using jamming and flexible structures that could replace a robotic claw. A typical claw needs hinges, motors, and feedback sensors to prevent it from crushing the object it's trying to hold, and the computational power to operate them. But Jaeger's jamming-based gripper is more like a beanbag, flowing around the object and then holding it gently. "We came at this from a completely different perspective," he says, "looking for a way to short-circuit this inherent complexity." For those want to try a HOWTO, Carlos Asmat, Jr. has a cool web entry and video of his DIY version of the gripper using a balloon, tubing, cloth, a rubber band, and ground coffee. (via University of Chicago Magazine)...

Shape-shifting robot can grip differently-shaped items

Backlink: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/3dCBbedahRE/shape-shifting-robot.html