In yet another episode of living the life you wish you had, last Friday I extracted myself from the RoBunker and went to witness The Head Rotor and Al Honig, world famous artists, show off Chassis the beer pouring robot.

Ky00t, thy name is Chassis:

More pics after the break.
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We journeyed to the southland last Thursday nigt to partake in a fun little event organized by the the AAAI, or the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

The topic was robot racing and the guests were none other than Sebastian Thrun, of Stanford University, the winner of the DARPA desert Challenge; and Red Whittaker, of the CarNAYgie Mellon robot racing team.

They both gave lovely presentations, and made me want to cover them in gooey scientific lovin’.

So maybe androids don’t dream of electric sheep, but thanks to a new project by artists Brendan Burns and Fernando Orellana, they can dance about the electric sheep *you* dream of:

Using recorded brainwave activity and eye movements during REM sleep to determine robot behaviors and head positioning, “Sleep Waking” acts as a way to “play-back” dreams. Through this piece we hope to investigate one of the possible human-robot relationships.

We Make Money Not Art has a nice interview with both the artists about thier piece and what it means for human-machine interaction and robot world peace.

It appears there is some sort of machination going on over at Instructables which merits mentioning.

Mostly because the robot is cute.

I am sure the folks over on the Instructables forums will do their best at darkly hinting at Interesting things to come, I’m sure. . .

*With love to Tom Waits. . .

So, being Feverish I like to augment the pain of illness with the pain of exceptionally violent, bloody cinema - I think it has something to do with reminding myself that it can always be worse.

Dribbling through my movie collection my antennae went up in jolly recognition when I espied a couple of familiar images in that piece of filmic mastery, Saw IV:

Yep, that’s a PackBot.

Here’s a little interesting tidbit forwarded from Ariel Waldman about what
David Lynch, auteur terrible, thinks of product placement.

I say, hey, if it gets people looking at your robots. . .

Therefore in honor of Valentine’s day, here are some robot pole dancers:

They were at The Big Day Out this year down under.

[Thanks sharp-eyed commenter Wiml, via JWZ]

Bob Full and Co. over at UC Berkeley get props from the SF Chronicle for their work with geckos.

I have a crush on Bob Full, who spoke for us at the AAAS conference last year in SF.

Now really, who wants jocks playing footbal when yu can have animated robots playing football?

From Super deluxe.

Congrats to Kevin Pratt, our homie down in sunny Florida, for convincing the University of South Florida that he will not, in fact, use his power for evil, and filing his thesis on robotic search and rescue!



There will always be a place for you in our supervillain lair should you ever decide to come to the dark side, Kevin. We’ll let you sleep under the death ray.