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World’s best-loved robot flunks its first proper job: Asimo flustered by visitors’ gestures and questions while working as museum guide
News – Gadgets & Tech
The Independent
by David McNeill
July 3, 2003

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time: one of Japan’s top science museums has borrowed Honda Motor’s iconic spaceman robot, Asimo, as a guide. But the confused bot is struggling to distinguish between people raising their hands to ask a question and just taking photos.
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Raffaello D’Andrea: The astounding athletic power of quadcopters #TED :

From: Gizmodo and IEEE Spectrum (Full article)
by: Eric Limer / Evan Ackerman
6/5/2013

There’s something inherently creepy about tiny, skittering robots, and if you need to add a new terrifying bullet point to the robot apocalypse list, you might as well start here. This 6.5-cm guy can move at 30 body-lengths per second. If it were a full-size car, that amounts to about 400 miles per hour.

Developed by researchers at Johns Hopkins and shown off at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Germany, the tiny unnamed robot is a mere 6.5 by 5.5 by 1 centimeters. But thanks to direct drive and little wheeled-legs called “whegs,” it could very well be the fastest robot ever for its size. Each wheg has its own ridiculous six millimeter motor that spins at 40,000 RPM (and costs several hundred dollars), and the bot only uses less than half of that power since not every sweep of the legs connects with ground quite right.

Researchers think that if they outfit the bugger with slightly larger whegs, they might be able to get it going even faster, while still retaining the ability to climb over stuff in its way and fit in the palm of your hand. Who knows what kind of use these little bots could be put to but battery life is bound to be a concern. For now though, just seeing one dart across the floor is cool (and creepy) enough. [IEEE Spectrum]

Make Magazine
By Stett Holbrook
06/04/2013

Christian Ristow’s 26-ton mechanical hand and forearm made an appearance at Maker Faire Bay Area 2013 this past month and MAKE Senior Editor Goli Mohammadi was there to experience the Hand of Man—firsthand. The giant robotic hand is controlled by a human sized glove that clenches and smashes in response to the user’s movements.

From: ARS Technica
By: Kyle Orland
June 3, 2013

A newly revealed partnership seeks to bring the interactivity of Sony’s video games to the world of Lego’s physical bricks and characters. At a 25th anniversary open house for Sony’s Computer Science Laboratories in Japan, the companies showed off Toy Alive, a prototype project that uses simple Lego bricks with embedded microchips that can be controlled with a PC or a DualShock gamepad.

The Toy Alive team is currently showing off a tiny, remote-controlled platform that can be controlled with a DualShock gamepad to play a chase game monitored by a webcam and computer software. Other bricks use translucent red plastic and built-in, computer-controlled LEDs to make a Lego house look like it’s on fire or to activate an actuator that causes Lego models to explode into pieces. The team is even experimenting with tiny wireless cameras that can give a minifig-eye view of a scene for a bit of augmented reality.

Lego has long supported interactivity in its toys through its Mindstorms line of robotics aimed at programmers and students. But with Toy Alive, the team is trying to “keep the pieces small and simple so that children can use them with other toys,” according to associate researcher Alexis Andre, who has been working on the project for about a year. “It’s a mixture of video games and toys, and how do you make toys more interactive? How do you provide a platform for the children to do whatever they want to do?”

It’s all still in the prototype phase for now, and it looks like any products to come out of this effort are still at least a few years away from your local toy shop. In the meantime, there’s always the other merger of Lego and video game technology.