It’s always been pretty incredible that drones in Afghanistan can be flown remotely from a trailer in Nevada, and it shouldn’t be much of surprise that things go wrong with the communication link from time to time. Apparently, it happens often enough that drone pilots program a continually updating safety pattern into their flight plans, so that if communications are lost, the drone will fly in circles until things get straightened out. Really, the drones are supposed to be smart enough to do this on their own, and also smart enough to autonomously return to base should something go not-quite-catastrophically wron. They don’t always manage it, however, and while it’s sometimes rather charming, a malfunctioning military asset with live weapons is a somewhat more serious matter.

Drones aren’t currently equipped with auto-destruct mechanisms or anything like that, so if all communications are lost and the drone doesn’t look like it’s coming back anytime soon, the accepted tactic is to scramble an attack aircraft (with a human in it) and shoot the drone down someplace where it’s not going kill anyone or be salvageable by anyone else. This is what happened on Sunday in Afghanistan, when a manned aircraft took “proactive measures” (use your imagination, they’re not elaborating) to cause an unresponsive MQ-9 Reaper to crash into the side of a mountain.

More, after the jump. (Read more…)

And just what Dexter is planning on doing with that Coke after he pours it, I have no idea. Same goes for the Jello. What I found most amusing, though, is how Coke apparently decided that Dexter’s normal amount of joint noise (i.e. very little) is not sufficiently robot-y for most people (most people in Brazil, anyway), so those smooth quiet noises got replaced by brrZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzz.

[ Motoman ]

Wired posted a gallery on Friday of surgical robots, and Bloodbot here caught my eye, largely because it seemed to be the most practical. The robot consists of an arm with a needle and a probe. In order to find an accessible vein, the robot probes around your arm until it finds an area of flesh that is a little bit less squishy than the rest. Then it jabs you with a needle, and when it feels a little pop indicating that it’s punched through into a vein, it knows to stop the jabbage, lest it go right through the other side of your vein, out the back of your arm, and into your femoral artery, causing a massive amount of hemorrhaging that will no doubt kill you in minutes.

So far, the robot is accurate about 78% of the time.

So, based on this fair and balanced description, what do you think? Would you feel more or less comfortable having a robot (that gets it right more than ‘most’ of the time, of course) suck your blood out as opposed to a human?

And as for the other robots in the slide show, we’ve written about most of them. The other interesting one that we haven’t really covered is ARES, which is a robot that you swallow in pill-sized pieces and it puts itself together in your tummy using magnets. After it does whatever it does, some of the modules will biodegrade while the rest… Uh… Have to come out the old fashioned way. This concept isn’t too much different than the stochastic modular robots that we wrote about in 2007, albeit on a significantly larger scale.

The whole slideshow is available here.

[ Bloodbot ] VIA [ Wired ]

Man, that Cracked video just keeps giving up gems. Turns out that the bit about ASIMO being able to identify objects by class came from a BBC show called James May’s Big Ideas… being a long-time Top Gear fan, I was able to immediately recognize his shaggy locks in the 0.5 second that they were visible in the video. Anyway, I’d like to reiterate what May says in the beginning of the segment, because it’s something that we tend to point out a lot around here:

“Robots and computers are very very good at things we find very difficult, such as long division and VAT returns. But they’re very very bad at things we find extremely easy and instinctive, such as walking, talking, and seeing.”

Lots more, after the jump. (Read more…)

Even if you didn’t approve of the NSFW Cracked video we posted today, it does provide a good excuse for me to post the entirely SFW and spectacularly awesome and interesting and exciting NOVA program on the DARPA Grand Challenge. I must have seen this program five or six times now, and it still gives me chills to watch what these robots are capable of. And don’t forget that this was back in 2005; since then we’ve had the DARPA Urban Challenge and four more years of progress in miniaturization, computing speed, and artificial intelligence. Driverless cars are already here… It’s just a matter of time, now, before you’re sitting in one.

Update- For our international readers (or people who just plain don’t like Hulu), there’s a version via YouTube, after the jump. (Read more…)

Although this post is SFW, the following video is not, as it contains dirty words and a crude (at times very crude) sense of humor.

Those Aren’t Muskets, who’re responsible for the hilarious and quite NSFW Internet Party sketch, have partnered up with Cracked.com to produce a series of webisodes about, uh, I have no idea. Episode 16 examines the 7 robots most likely to rise up against humanity, and unsurprisingly, we’ve covered most of these bots (albeit usually in a slightly different light) here on BotJunkie:

-Swarm Robots Kidnap Child
-MTRAN Modular Robot
-BigDog (of course)
-Stanley (the DARPA Grand Challenge was before our time, but you should absolutely watch this to find out more).
-ARSS (the “robot gun”)
-RI-Man (actually an older version of RIBA)
-RiSE
-ASIMO
-AIBO
-DEKA Luke Arm
-Robot Zombie Chair
-RunBot
-Nexi
-Giant Robot Spider

There’s more where that came from (not about robots, though) on Cracked’s YouTube channel.

See that sidebar on the right? If you haven’t noticed yet, BotJunkie has a Twitter feed that shows up over there, right below the list of post categories. The feed contains links to our posted articles for Twitter people who are too lazy to check the site, but we also post links to a bunch of other robot stuff that for one reason or another isn’t quite right for a full BotJunkie post. Here’s a sample of what we’ve Twittered over the last week:

Dean Kamen interviewed on Robots Podcast http://8ajaa.tk

Idea contest for Affordable Robots http://908y6.tk

MAKE weekend project: build a Blubberbot http://v3dwr.tk

Alan Turing gets official apology, robots everywhere say “about time” and “we’re human” http://8aqdi.tk

So, once you’ve made it through our regular posts, don’t forget to give the Twitter feed a glance for more robot-y goodness.

[ BotJunkie on Twitter ]

Yes. It’s exactly what you think. And this is why robots are awesome… Where else could you find a deal like that?

As always, you can catch the other Bots With Stuff from last week over on The Shoebox Blog, including a robot with a brain cloud and a robot with 11 herbs and spices.

[ Bots With Stuff ]

This robot is called Taizou, which gets machine translated as “elephant want,” somehow making the robot extra super adorable. Actually, Taizou is a play on the word “taisou” which means “calisthenics,” since this plastic-headed robot in a space suit (?) with clown shoes (??) is designed to help the elderly exercise. Taizou is 28 inches tall and weighs 15 pounds, and can demonstrate 30 different exercises (through physical motions and natural language commentary) with 26 degrees of freedom.

Taizou has some simple voice recognition capabilities or it can be controlled with a remote. Although it can run for up to two hours on a charge, it’s designed to demonstrate most of its exercises from the comfort of a special chair, presumably because it’s more elderly-friendly to exercise that way. Taizou goes on sale next year for about $8000.

[ General Robotix (Translated) ] VIA [ Robot Watch (Translated) ] and [ Pink Tentacle ]

What happens when Warbots are created that are so dangerous that they get declared WMDs? You end up with a lot of unemployed Warbots is what, and like any other robot trying to get by in the world, they need job. Like, say, as accountants.

It doesn’t work out so well.

But not in the way you’re probably thinking.

Warbot In Accounting is created by Brian Clevinger, of Atomic Robo and 8-Bit Theater.

[ Warbot In Accounting ] VIA [ io9 ]