Also, lizards are awesome:

The investigators found the lizards swung their tails to correct for errors made at launch. For instance, slippery surfaces made their feet skid, but the reptiles corrected for such anomalies with appropriate tail movements in mid-air.

To help confirm their findings, the scientists produced a lizard-size wheeled robot named “Tailbot” that had an aluminum tail and could leap like a ski jumper from a ramp. During each jump, the robot’s front wheels, which left the ramp first, started falling while the rear ones were still on the ramp, causing the machine to tilt downward. To avoid a nosedive into the landing pad, Tailbot corrected the angle of its body before landing by using tail movements controlled by feedback from an onboard gyroscope.

Here’s more on Tailbot and other work from Bob Full’s PolyPedal biomimetic robot lab at UC Berkeley.

Bio-inspired robots are always inspiring, especially when we can put into quantitative data why an animal is designed that way.

[Via KQEDScience from The Christian Science Monitor]

It’s nice to see that the morphing robot has come such a long way since July.

We have a spiffy little interview with Zenta, The Man Himself, which you may peruse if you care to do so.

Everybody congratulate Bentern on scooping Pop Sci, then tell him to GET BACK TO WORK.

Wired’s Eric Smalley has an awesomely titled article about a Massachusetts based startup, Harvest Automation, is testing a small farming robot to work in nurseries in the horticulture industry.

The Harvest Automation robots are knee-high, wheeled machines. Each robot has a gripper for grasping pots, a deck for carrying pots, and an array of sensors to keep track of where it is and what’s around it. Teams of robots zip around nursery fields, single-mindedly spacing and grouping plants. Think Wall-E without the doe eyes and cuddly personality, or the little forest-tending ‘bots in the 1972 sci-fi classic Silent Running.

Thank you Wired!

Well said, Morskoiboy.

The contraption he’s built allows anyone to create crazy cocktails depending on what you type:

The man, the mystery, the legend explains:

So, if you’re interested, let me explain this contraption and the mechanism that makes it work. At the top of the machine there is a slot into which a bottle with alcohol, water, or even milk can be screwed. The essence of the art here lies in the ability of the syrups or liqueurs to tint the neutral color of the liquid.

…

Pressing the buttons on the keyboard injects the corresponding ingredients into the display, which tints different segments of the display and thus produces letters. You can try to imagine that each letter can have a taste (L-Lime, A-Apple), a color (R-Red, G-Green), or a name (K-Kahlua, J-Jagermeister).

Props to http://www.morskoiboy.com/

They were thought up and done by the fine folks at Neatorama, who absolutely *promised* they would take the electrodes off my chihuahua and get my power tools back from the scrapyard the very *minute* I told EVERYONE I KNOW about them! Whee!!

There are many cute robots to chose from, they do jolly dances as you make your morning tea! Love them and their nutty boltiness!

Please write to them and say that you just love their steampunk robots, and that you would like to buy them by the gross, otherwise their hands might slip and HAHAHAHAHA OOPS CRISPY @LILFOO! Hahaha! those wacky, wacky Neatorama guys. Wacky.

Oh god please help they have my dog and my mig welder

Actually, yes. Yes it can. In a good way though.

Maywa Denki the Japanese robotics consortium that defies description (which is how we like it) instituted the Bacarobo competition in 2008.

The rules are simple: The robot has to have absolutely no practical function, it has to be mechanical, and it has to make people laugh. Sounds like Robot Comedy Gold to me.

Bacarobo Europe is happening in October in Budapest. If you are headed in that direction around that time, you should definitely seriously consider attending. For Science!

We <3 Robot Japan so flippin’ hard, we are eager for their presence at RoboGames 2012!

Thanks Robots Dreams!

It’s the dramatic on-pull of the sensory vest that gets me every time.

Thanks Science Seminars for the link, also for the comment “It is creepy and sounds like a toilet.”

*It should not automatically be construed that The Rotor’s mysterious, regrettable disappearance had anything to do with the aforementioned exclamation. Although if it were construed, automatically or not, it could be neither confirmed or denied. All we know is that he’s gone and WE KNOW NOTHING, OKAY?