Category: Robots
Hitachi unveils your future desk mate
Meet EMIEW 2. EMIEW stands for Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Workmate, which is a nightmare for the poor thing to type in every morning when it logs onto the network, so EMIEW 2 it is.
EMIEW is an office worker robot, which was recently demonstrated at Hitachi’s Research Lab. It has the ability to (brace yourself) guide visitors…
Why having sex with robots is not Bad And Wrong
I was quite excited to see Honda’s Asimo robot at CES last year, but at no point did I feel the urge to leap on-stage and have sticky man-bot love with him. Honestly. Yet it’s those kind of couplings (well, the man-robot part, not the live on-stage at CES part) that are the subject of a book called ‘Love + Sex With Robots’.
Tony the effeminate robotic suitcase, able to follow you about town like R2-D2
In my eyes, it looks like a rush-job on MS Paint, but according to The Raw Feed, this is actually a picture of a robotic suitcase, available from 2009 through a Russian catalogue.
Now, apparently the suitcase is called ‘Tony’. Heaven knows who’d want a suitcase named Tony following you about…
Kobie – the robot koala bear from Korea
The koala isn’t exactly the most exciting animal in the world – it climbs trees and it eats eucalyptus leaves. That’s about it. But it’s not stopped boffins from making a robot one, under the name of Kobie.
Sanyo Yuka Shita robot will inspect your foundations (while you laugh at its name)
Yuka Shita? Sanyo clearly had one eye on titillating juvenile Western tech bloggers when it named its new robot. If only it was a cookingbot, I could spend the next few paragraphs being rude about it. Ah well.
Japanese gamblers encouraged to feed losing tickets to ROBO-GOAT!
A robotic goat? Wow. Just wow. I thought that’d be the last animal I’d see roboticised, but it appears gamblers in Tokyo can even interact with one, after losing insane amounts of yen at the Edogawa Kyotei boat race course.
Punters are encouraged to mourn their losses by feeding their losing tickets to the robo-goat, to minimise littering…
Delicate robot fingers to caress your scalp
It looks quite terrifying, but don’t let the fact that it has enough power to rip your head off put you off having a relaxing head rub.
The WAO-1 robot, developed by Japan’s Waseda University, was initially designed to help massage people with jaw problems back to health. Then someone stuck their head in it for a laugh/drunken bet…
Opinion: Why are robots still so rubbish!
So there I was on Friday, snowed under with work and wanting the weekend to arrive but take a bit longer than usual to get here so I could finish off everything I needed to do. And then it struck me, what I actually needed was some help around the house. No, I don’t mean an eastern European cleaner, or a girlfriend – the first is too expensive and the second a lot of hassle, or should that be the other way around?
And then I read on Tech Digest about the iRobot Looj: the robot that cleans your gutter. Now that’s more like it! A robot for cleaning my gutter, I WANT ONE! The fact my gutting doesn’t need cleaning and is currently free of leaves, is of no consequence…
Japanese engineers create leaping robot
After watching British TV sci-fi during my formative years, I'm firmly of the conclusion that walking up stairs is enough to keep me safe from mechanical menace. Not anymore. Japanese engineers at the University of Tokyo have created a…
Robosapien gets a Sesame Street makeover to become ElmoSapien
Cor. Someone’s taken the Robosapien robot and merged it with an Elmo hand puppet to produce ElmoSapien, complete with over 200 custom sound effects to make the bot sound just like the real Elmo.
Well, the fictional puppet Elmo, obviously, but you know what I mean. Full instructions on how to make ElmoSapien are provided on the RobotsRule website, and it seems fairly easy. Better still, it’s effectively a suit for your Robosapien, so doesn’t mess the bot up if you want to transform him back in the future.
