Giant mechanical spiders take away some of the hurt in the world:

Just *listening* to it is awesome. See the giant stompy monster action from a different angle here.

[Thanks Alexander Rose! Merci Beaucoup pur les fotos, Tristian Sabatier!

Robot Evolution, for your watching pleasure, because we’re freakin’ busy over here:

[Thanks Rochelle!]

The New Space Station Robot Asks to be Called “Dextre the Magnificent”

“In a surprising and potentially troubling request, the new space station robot known as Dextre demanded that astronauts refer to it in the future at “Dextre the Magnificent.” Brandishing power tools that would make any handyperson blush, the mobile servicing system thanked humans for creating it and promised a glorious future where humans would retain an important role in the new robot order. Dextre was deployed last month to help build and service the International Space Station. As seen in the above picture, Dextre is truly a technological marvel, wielding long arms capable of handling both small tools and large modules with precision dexterity. ”

NASA [via Bot Junkie]

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.

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.

Apropos of Whurley’s account of his near-death robot experience, imagine what they coulda done with another robot and a giant bulletproof robot arena?

Here’s two other superheavyweights, Ziggy (the white one) and The Judge (both of whom you might recognize from some TV show or other:

Keep in mind that though they look small on the screen, these guys are each 340 pounds of solid robot muscle. They regularly tuna-can the arena bumpers (those I-beams inside the arena) with very little effort. They also take three or four people to load in and out, and they are sharp and pointy.

Here are two more ‘bots that I know for a fact are never, ever, ever tested or demo’ed anywhere where there is even a remote chance a human might get in the way, and these guys are “only” 220-pound Heavyweights. Please take note of the squeals of childish delight as the mechanisms steadily beat the shit out of each other:

This is Brutality Vs. Megabyte. Megabyte has been a robot combat knucklehead since small times, and is truly the major reason we had to buy and entirely new arena. Brutality is notable in that Little Paulie Ventimiglia, age 19 at the time, beat the living heck out of previously undefeated world Battlebots champ Biohazard.
On his first ever robot combat outing. With his first ever combat robot. I love evolution.

Here’s another video that shows you don’t have top have a Spinning Thing Of Death to kick serious ass:

That was Sewer Snake Vs. Original Sin, both of whom tightly conform to Judge Dave’s Rule, “Learn To Fucking Drive”. That match was at MakerFaire 2007 (which coincidentally is coming up soonish!)

Here’s another video that shows exactly what kind of physical forces we’re the dealing with here. There’s a reason we have an arena with a roof:

Once again, these robots are as large and heavy as Steel Reign, the robot which figured in the BarCamp Austin Anomaly. Look at how big the robot is compared to the humans. We’re not talking tinkertoys here, boys and girls.

The best part about this whole debacle, is that it is proven that it’s WAY better live.

So get your tickets to RoboGames and bring your freakin’ earplugs already.

Because when robots appear in Marie Claire Italia, they are well and truly part of the popular lexicon:

[Thanks Le Boing]

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]