SKIRMISHER

What are you gonna do if your polar bears keep dying on you? Use robots!

A zoo somewhere, whose polar bear display has gone empty for some time because of the bears’ annoying habit of actually dying, has installed a family of robotic polar bears, to keep the kids interested and entertained, and, most importantly, not [...]

In the late 1960s, Philips commissioned Edward Ihnatowicz, so chosen because nobody could pronounce his name, to make a “something like a robot, like a giant, like something that could shrink people’s testicles when they see it” thing. Edward gave life to the instruction by making Senster, a robotic sculpture that “interacted” with visitors with [...]

The 900Global RC bowling ball is your bestfriend in the bowling lane if you’re retarded and you just want to freak out the old lady in the other lane who thinks she’s The Jesus from the Big Lebowski. Hah! That’ll teach her.

I don’t know why I keep writing about these freaky frightening walking robot things Boston Dynamics churns out, but maybe because I hold the same fascination of one looking at his future overlord-executioner. The company is making “great” strides with its Petman bipedal robot, whose awesomeness can be observed in the youtube video below. We [...]

UC Berkeley’s Biomimetics Lab created this 16-gram hexapedal robot called Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod, or just DASH. But another “just” can be applied to what DASH can do: it just wouldn’t fucking die. It can be dropped from a height of 28 meters and it would still be up on its six feet and [...]

To add more to the worry that robots would soon rise up and kill us and drink our blood and eat the intestines of our children, here’s another: as aid to human burglars, although unwittingly, by means of the existing “security holes” in the home wireless network.
Among the worrying security issues they discovered was that [...]

Italian and Swedish scientists have developed the first robotic hand that can “feel”, made possible by connecting human nerve ending with tiny electronic sensors. Now said robotic hand is used by a 22-year-old previously hand-less man who lost it through cancer.
link

Obviously, Taiwan’s military has its eye on recruiting those thousands of useless, Transformers-playing nerds living in their mother’s basement.

There’s something about this robot match that makes my anus hairs shiver in hilarity.

From Those Aren’t Muskets, a robotic joke that, if we’re not lucky and if Ray Kurzweil’s correct, might turn out to be true.

OmniZero 9 is the latest version of Takeshi Maeda’s series of awesome robots. It actually kicked ass and won at the annual ROBO-ONE competition in Toyoma, Japan, beating another robot with such an awesome name as AerobattlerMonstar. Whoa!
via

“ABB Robots installed by RG Luma are helping specialist food company Honeytop to speed up its pancake production and improve health, safety & hygiene,” just to really live up to the whole “untouched by human hands” thing. Except at one point certain humans actually would still touch the food, for good ol’ germs!

I-SWARM (that’s “intelligent small-world autonomous robots for micro-manipulation” for you, kid) are three-legged solar-powered droids less than 4 mm long, wide, tall, that can communicate with one another, interact with the environment, and now can be mass manufactured.
Also, they can “form a group that is capable of establishing swarm intelligence to generate more complex behavior.”
Yeah, [...]

This is Toyota’s humanoid robot, demonstrating one physical thing we humans take for granted: running like hell. And by that I mean, 7 km/h. Rather flimsy, but Honda’s Asimo used to get people’s attention with its 6 km/h speed. And now this. A few years, and we’d all be living in caves, calling ourselves “The [...]

The world’s growing population is devouring seafood as quickly as it can be caught and has seriously depleted the world’s wild fish stocks, experts warn.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says 70 percent of all the worlds’ fisheries are exploited—that is, barely able to replenish themselves at current catch rates—overexploited, or depleted.
…
That’s one reason that [...]

Right as I type this, Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield, is running across a field and screaming, “Holy shit! Holy shit!” at the fact of killer robots that can and will totally whack us are here, and they’re not very friendly.
…drones that could decide when and who [...]