SKIRMISHER

Ground-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.
The revelations were made by Kevin Fahey, US Army program executive officer for ground forces, at the recent RoboBusiness conference in [...]

Now that we’ve settled the “would it actually swim?” issue, it would be nice if we finally solve the high-brow and ultimately important “can we make it lick its own anus?” robotic challenge.
{Intriguing: The robot dog, Earth’s future overlord}

MIT’s Nexi “Mobile Social Dexterous” (MDS) Robot is one of the most advanced robots around, simply because it’s designed to fool you with its “emotions.” The video actually explains it all, as she runs down the human emotions she’s capable of “expressing” — sad, angry, bored. Exactly the same existential shit humans endure every single [...]

The METI Human Patient Simulator: it breathes, urinates and blinks with uncanny realism. It is used in simulating a wide variety of traumatic injuries and corresponding symptoms. Doctors can feel pulses on the feet, hands, arms, neck and groin; insert IV needles into the arm; hear the heart beat and the lungs inflate; see the [...]

Foster-Miller’s Talon robots, currently making the inhabitants of Iraq and Afghanistan deliriously happy, can be equipped with night and thermal vision, live cameras, and a machine gun, and they can detonate bombs. The nice specimen you see in the video above can blast the beejesus out of anything that looks and smells funny in its [...]

The extremely robust 4WD Spybot from Macroswiss — it can swim and manage any terrain and is known to be virtually unstoppable. We’re serious. The inventors asked a bunch of 7-year-old girls to stop it and none if them could, even when they threatened it with pogo sticks and screamed “Mommy!” Currently a darling with [...]

Pentagon-backed researchers (or at least one of them) have managed to implant micro-mechanical systems (MEMS) inside certain insects during the early stages of metamorphosis, making them part-insect, part machine, hopefully remote-controllable. As bugs grow older, tissues grow around and fuse with the tiny implanted MEMS. Pentagon envisions a future swarming with these cyborg insects spies.
{Intriguing: [...]

Boston Dynamics‘ BigDog video encore. As you remember, kick it, abuse it, have another dog hump it like crazy, and it will just go and on and and on like an Energizer monstah. Nothing says “someday I shall rule you with unfeeling ruthlessness” better than the sight of an unstoppable, irrepressible quadruped DARPA-funded robot. [...]

“Good news from the flight control room. Dextre has power.”
– Mission Control, after astronauts finally fixed NASA’s shuttle robot Dextre after two days of “sleep” due to a power cable flaw.

At an international competition in Agra, India, robot-making teams will slug it out to get the title and a $600,000 funding for the best tiny flying machine inspired by moths, locusts, flies and birds — a micro aerial vehicle (MAV).
The best MAV must be hard to detect, maneuverable, portable, and more energy efficient than a [...]