As DARPA has demonstrated, one of the best (and most fun) ways to foster progress in robotics is through competition. Society of Robots keeps bringing us surprises from the 2009 Singapore Robot Games, including this competition for submarine robots. The video isn’t exactly action-packed, but it’s interesting to skip through and see all the different sub designs:

Part 2 of the sub competition is available here.

[ SRG ] VIA [ Society of Robots ]

Hamsters are cute and all, but what have they done for me lately? I think iRobot has a handle on their next great consumer product with this Create, which has been modified to fetch you a beer soda from the fridge:

The Create Fridgemate looks like it’s easily capable of emptying a 12 pack for you, and it takes long enough in fetch mode to give you time to pound each one in sequence without killing yourself. I don’t know if it can tell good beer from cheap beer, but if it keeps leaving the fridge open, everything’ll get downgraded to “warm” anyway.

[ iRobot on YouTube ]