UPDATE: YouTube, being an entity that knows what’s good for us whether we know it or not [eyeroll] has pulled this video. Happily, the educated technofetishists at Wired have hosted it on thier owne servers. The link is updated below. Thanks for the heads-up, Jackson!

Just to keep The Rotor giggling nervously, we have unearthed a nifty little Wired piece on a new and NSFW video featuring the scourge of young robots everywhere. Yes, Robot Porn. Yum.

The Sex Life of Robots is a film piece by artist Michael Sullivan which the artist characterizes as “a silent robot porno movie from another planet.” Sounds *exactly* like our cup of tea. Even better than The Terminator Kama Sutra.

It’s presently at the Museum of Sex in NYC.

I love Clayton Bailey. His robots may not run around and do cartwheels, but they sure do look cool.

[via Make]

Gareth Branwyn over at Street Tech reports on a neat BEAM-style project involving a gutted Playstation, some aluminum flashing and a metric ton of patience.

Mercury is a light seeking, dark detecting, almost completely analog bugbot. It’s so elegant we want to make one, but we get distracted by things that are shiny.

At Nextfest, we saw first hand the awesome power of L’ Ecole Polytechnique Federal De Lausanne’s Biologically inspired Robotics Group.

Behold, The Salamander:

The wheels of the Salamander are in no way active. The wheels are free floating and connected to no motors. The Salamander’s motion is generated entirely through spinal cord action, which we think is incredibly sexy.

This video was taken by Mr. Robotics at Wired Nextfest last wekend, which was a rollicking good time.

We all knew it had to happen. Wil Wheaton, formerly of Star Trek: The Next Generation, has been doing something other than blogging for the past few years:

Los Angeles, CA – Actor and Internet personality, Wil Wheaton, has been indicted by federal prosecutors on charges of promoting and hosting a robot fighting ring.

Prosecutors allege Wheaton kicked and electrocuted robots that weren’t performing well, as many as fifteen robots. “He just blew their circuits,” said US Attorney Bob Schrumpkin.

That BASTard. We’d certainly never approve of anything as crass as Robot Fighting.

Kawada’s HRP-2 (aka Promet) has been programmed to reproduce dance steps with the practiced grace of an electronic geisha.

So far the 128-pound (58-kilogram) dancebot has been taught the fluid motions of the Aizu-Bandaisan—a traditional Japanese folk dance—as well as more mundane tasks such as serving tea, carrying a table, and standing up from a prone position.

OK - now it should be noted, that I am the most jaded American roboticist I know. Been there, done that, flown half way ’round the world to see it, too.

The following video is the single coolest thing I’ve seen in robotic movement. Ever.

Better than Asimo.
Way better than Qrio.
And yes, even better than the micro-electronic hand that could grab the tobiko egg.

Watch this video and be awed.

I think Promet ought to call out Asimo to some seedy back alley in Shinjuku (filled with indigent tour-bots and broken down vacuums) and bitch slap him.

Of course, Lem knew about it ten months ago.

the arm bone’s connected to the, shoulder bone…

Mr. Robotics’ favorite game in the whole world is winning at “oh, you can too get toys from a claw machine.” The RoboBunker proves this with hundreds of plushies won from claws. But now, nirvana has reared it’s pretty head:

The robots come from MechaTrax, a Japanese android company.

NASA on Saturday is to launch space probe Phoenix on a nine-month journey to Mars’ arctic region, where it will dig through ice for clues to past or present microbial life on the red planet.

The Phoenix Mars Lander is scheduled for blastoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida on August 4, with a first attempt at 5:36 am (0936 GMT), and a second attempt, should it be needed, at 6:02 am (1002 GMT). more.

Rover engineers are growing increasingly concerned about the temperature of vital electronics on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity while the rover stays nearly inactive due to a series of dust storms that has lasted for more than a month.

Dust in the atmosphere and dust settling onto Opportunity’s solar panels challenges the ability of the solar panels to convert sunlight into enough electricity to supply the rover’s needs. The most recent communication from Opportunity, received Monday, July 30, indicates that sunlight over the rover’s Meridiani Planum location remains only slightly less obscured than during the dustiest days Opportunity survived in mid-July. With dust now accumulating on the solar panels, the rover is producing barely as much energy as it is using in a very-low-power regimen it has been following since July 18.

Mainstream reporters don’t always get robot stories right. There’s a real tendency to anthropomorphize anything with eyes or legs. Some researchers — imagine! — take advantage of that, even when there’s nothing more intelligent going on then your average spambot. Here’s a refreshing departure from the NYT:

As she fiddled with the computer that runs the robot, I smiled politely — almost as much for the robot’s sake, I realized, as for the robot maker’s — and thought: Well, maybe it is the camera sensor, but if this thing wails “You are too far away” one more time, I’m going to throttle it.

It’s a long article, but worth it if nothing else for the penultimate graf.

NYT link has been Rotorized so no registration is requred.

From our good friend and man in the field, Douglas Repetto:

Attention SB: avoid Knokke, Belgium. It’s full of bot-killers!

A moment of silence please for our comrades who perhaps entered this establishment, but never came out . . .

Because guys with bulk email processors rank right up there with the Terminator:

Top cop Predicts Robot Crimewave:

Technology such as cloned part-robot humans used by organised crime gangs pose the greatest future challenge to police, along with online scamming, Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Mick Keelty says.

The Hell. The Commish may have a few good points about combating online crimes like identity theft and internet scams, and even makes a few good theoretical reaches into policing Second Life for cybercrime, but then the pills kick in and he goes on about part-human, part cloned robot people capable of leaping tall building in a single bound.

Too may nights up late reading comics under the covers Officer?

“You could (also) have technology acting at the direction of a human being, but the human being being distanced considerably from the actual crime scene.”

As Mr. Robotics says “One could also drive an RC car into a bank with a holdup note. Doesn’t mean the robot armies are coming about any time soon.”

Granted, remotely-programmed vehicles (an autonomous robot with a specific directive) are harder to track to the operator rather than a mere-smear RC controlled car, but still, the technology is so very far off that chances are the science and practice of law enforcement will have evolved into something wholly different from what it is nowadays.

Stand down, AFP, Skynet has not yet become sentient. We’ll keep you posted though.

(Image courtesy Salon.com)

The world’s very first antisocial network. Explore it in all its glory, and smite your enemies with the robotic spatula-ey goodness.

“My, *where* did you get that *lovely* spatula?”

[Thanks qDot, who is racing me to post this first.]