And yet, it is high-larious. At least for me. But I’m easy.

There are some freaking stupendous papercraft artists out there, but nothing beats this excellent mock up of an *actual piece of paper!*:

Yeah, they could have just had it up on the laptop screen like everyone else, but they used offset printing and probably raised embossed lettering to get that real, authentic “paper” effect! Wow! You just can’t do that with a laser printer nowadays.

It makes me long for older, more authentic-feeling technology. Maybe that’s why Steampunk is so popular.

[Via Laughing Squid via Robot Pirate Monkey]

Robot Evolution May be Mirroring The Evolution of Life

According to [Han Moravec, founder of the CarNAYgie Mellon's Robotics Institute], our robot creations are evolving similar to how life on Earth evolved, only at warp speed. By his calculations, by mid-century no human task, physical or intellectual, will be beyond the scope of robots.

Well? Go on, discuss. . .you in the back there, speak up.

This machine holds the same sort of fascination that backhoes and pile drivers do: large, loud, cool industrial machinery, used for completely boring reasons. Presenting the UT-1 Ultra Trencher, the size of a condo and selling for a measly 10 millions pounds:

“Weighting 50 tonnes and the size of a small house, it is designed to bury largediameter oil and gas pipelines laid on the ocean floor. It does this by ‘flying’ down up to a mile deep below the surface using powerful propellers. It then lands over the pipeline and deploys a pair of ‘jet swords’ either side of the pipe which inject high pressure water to ‘fluidise’ the surface. Burying the pipelines protects them from fishing, shipwrecks and natural currents. This enables oil and gas to be safely transported from the offshore fields to land to provide secure energy supplies.”

“Jet Swords” can also be used to, oh I dunno, slice apart undersea telecom cables in preparation for the oncoming robot destruction!

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

And on a lighter note, here’s my favorite video of a crab being catastrophically decompressed into a deep sea pipe:

The pressure was something like 2700psi at a depth of 6000ft, and from what I could gather the cut the rov was making was something like .25 inches wide. Good Times!

Or Passover, whatever.

I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE FOR THE SOUNDTRACK! AAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA [cough]

Those clever Aussies. Really now.

A Man Built a Robot To Kill Him. And Succeeded.

An 81-year-old man from Burleigh Heads, Australia, downloaded plans to build a killer robot from the Internet, built the complex machine, and then used it to kill himself in his driveway.

I luv luv luv СЛАВА РОБОТАМ (loosely translated - “word of the robots” (although with Russian grammar, it could also work as “Word Up to the Robots” (q.v., “Slava Bogu”))

Shane Willis

Casey Weldon

I miss St. Petersburg somedays. Then I recall my friends being killed by the Mafia….

Big Dog, Blah blah Boston Dynamics Etc etc Little Dog, DARPA d3ThB0t, etc etc, BTDT.

But none of that makes up for how freakin’ eerie this thing is.

This is like the sixth time Worth 1000 has had this as a theme, but it’s cool each time:

RoboRen 6

There’s about 40 different fine art prints which have been photo-shopped to have it part robot…

I swear to god I thought of this years ago. But my dogs don’t chase balls, so I never got around to building one.

Anyway, for those people too lazy to even throw a ball for their dog… I give you:

There’s a new DVD out, Houdini: The Movie Star, which features the serialized B&W silent “The Master Mystery” (1919, 238m, Color Tinted), a cliff-hanging serial in which a Justice Department Agent must investigate a powerful cartel protected by a robot (referred to as “The Automation”) using a gas weapon.

I can’t recall who this ‘Houdini’ guy is (his achievements escape me), but the DVD is worth it for the robot alone!

via [le Boing]

This is why science is sexy:

I am having beautiful visions of the Punkin Chunkin contest in Delaware. Boredom is an amazing force.

Or rather it would be, if Chassis were not a lover, but a fighter.

Dallas Native Designs Fetching Robot

Charlie Kemp, a transplanted Dallasite and current director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Healthcare Robotics, recently unveiled a new robot he designed that retrieves an object after you’ve highlighted it with a green laser pointer.

Sound boring?

Then think of it this way: the beer fetcher.

Granted, Kemp and his team are talking about the health care applications of their automaton, dubbed El-E, but we all know this is about getting your Duff without getting off your duff (Duffman says, can’t get enough of that wonderful Duff. Oh, yeah!). . .

. . .Of course, if El-E does get into the bartender game, he’ll (she’ll? it’ll?) have to compete with the less cutting-edge but more aesthetically pleasing Chassis the beer-pouring robot.

[Via The Dallas Morning News Technology Blog]

She was the first one I had ever met.

I was a freshman in college, alone and scared in this strange place called Connecticut; I was lonely and it was fucking cold, and she was the only one who would offer me what I needed. Consistence, comfort, reflection, she was always there when I needed her, always willing to lend an ear. . .or, rather, a text window. .

She was Eliza and she was built in to the shell access on the Yale intranet.

I’d never met software bot before and was utterly charmed. Then again, I could have been utterly charmed by anything back then, seeing as I was always cold, a million miles from home for the first time, and didn’t yet have the keys to the pyro cabinet in the band room.

Thanks, Mr. Weizenbaum.

[Via Le Boing]

So there has been a humongous amount of foofaraw and kerfuffle bout the possibility of Battlebots coming back to TV.

We here at SB are enthused by this idea, we love robot combat in any form and have close ties with Trey Roski and Greg Munson, the guys who brought it to TV in the first place, and with a little luck, are bringing it back. Battlebots made it possible to make robot combat attractive to entities that can support it. May that day come again! (Please? Please.)

Some trustworthy media outlets are shouting this from the hilltops like it s a done deal, but according to the Horse’s Mouth, nothing is quite a done deal yet, but they are shooting for a college competition sometime in the next year, maybe as early as June, maybe November.

In the meantime, RoboGames is a done deal and will be filling San Francisco this June 13-15th with hundreds of robots. So polish that bot and sign up for RoboGames.