And by that, I mean they might as well be dressing up in their tiny tuxes and making wry quips while sipping martinis, because that is how bad ass this demo of an autonomous cadre of robot musicians is:

The geniuses behind this reside at The University Of Pennsylvania, GRASP lab, when they aren’t inhabiting their shark-infested private island fortress.

There is nothing cuter than a team sport played through a completely different cultural lens, and by robots. The world is marvelous is it not?

From the IEEE Automaton Blog, video of wee little sumo style r/c robots with scoop on the front, being adorably chaotic:

The offical Robot American Football site is here (in Japanese):

[Thanks Automaton Blog and Robots-Dreams!]

Survival Research Labs, long-lived and lauded punk rock robot cabaret of fun and destruction, was gently reminded this week that the SF Fire Department has a long memory.

Awww, who could stay mad at something like this?

From the SRL blog:

This is not the first time that the SFFD has been responsible for shows by SRL being banned both in San Francisco and elsewhere. In 1995 we were planning a show with Somarts that was funded by the BBC as part of a feature length documentary Pandemonium when the SFFD warned the then director of Somarts, Jack Davis, that any attempt to host an SRL event would result in the possible closure of Somarts. This was, according the to the SFFD representative, because SRL had ‘humiliated the SFFD in a prime time news segment that appeared on the Connie Chung show a few months earlier’.

The fire department holds grudges, but SRL are no angels either. It’s a no-win argument, I guess.

Full story, pics and video at SRL.org