By Chris Scott Barr

The pinnacle of modern civilization comes when man no longer has to get off his lazy rear to do mundane tasks like fetch beer. We’ve seen a bot that can do this before, but was a very specialized one that had no other real functions. You also couldn’t easily make or obtain one of these for yourself. Thankfully you can get your hands on the Robot Jox, which can grab your beer for you.

Sadly, this isn’t some awesome butler bot that is going to go to your kitchen and fetch booze whenever you require (when will we get these?!) but it can use its arms to pick up and carry your favorite beverage by mimicking your own arm movements (you’ll have to be wearing a special set of gloves to do this). It features built-in camera sensors for eyes, 20 degrees of movement and soon it will have modified gripper hands and limb extensions.

This robot friend is going to set you back a good chunk of change, weighing in at $4500. The applications beyond beer fetching are considerable, but I think I’ll hold out for my butler bot.

[ Vstone ] VIA [ Dvice ]

If you’re going to have a testbed robot wandering around investigating autonomous operations in office environments, you might as well have it do something useful. Like passing out snacks. Seriously… Greatest. Use. For a robot. Ever. SnackBot works at Carnegie Mellon University, which is way way too far away from me right now, ’cause I’m hungry.

The research will allow the robot to navigate through congested areas in a socially acceptable fashion, detect individual people moving near the robot, recognize when someone that the robot knows approaches it, and autonomously learn to recognize new objects.

Oh, and of course, SnackBot will support “research on snack services drawn from behavioral economics.” I can solve that for you right now: snacks are tasty, people like snacks, and a robot that brings tasty snacks to people will be well liked by all.

[ SnackBot.org ]

I’m going to be spending this week on vacation, somewhere around here. Part of the reason that it is a vacation is that I won’t have internet access to speak of. GAAAAHHHH. But fear not, that’s my problem (GAAAAHHHH), not yours… I’ve queued up some posts for every day of the week, and the up-to-date robot news will be taken care of by the talented and famous Andrew Liszewski, as well as the famous and talented Chris Scott Barr, both from OhGizmo.com. Enjoy the change of pace, and I’ll see y’all next week.

At least there’s only one robot … Otherwise, I’d be worried about crossing the streams.

As always, you can catch the other Bots With Stuff from last week over on The Shoebox Blog, including a robot with really bad acid reflux and a robot with robot #11′s really cool jetpack.

[ Bots With Stuff ]

This is some test footage of a Bad Robot, called Bad Robot, from Bad Robot (the short film). It was directed by Ruairi Robinson, who’s also working on Akira, and is currently in post-prodution. Nobody seems to be sure whether Bad Robot is a sci-fi comedy or sci-fi horror, but I do know one thing: Bad Robot is Evil. How can I tell it’s evil? Two things: the smile accompanied by the beady red eyes, and the fact that it’s dancing to Shirley Temple, who as you can plainly see, heralds directly from the dark side:

See? It’s not the unnatural cuteness or the song about animal abuse that scares me… It’s the fact that she takes a spoon with her at the end. A spoon. The horror, the horror!

Oh, and there’s also this poster:

“Soon every home will have a robot helper. Don’t worry, your kids are perfectly safe.”

Now do you believe me? Look for this in 2010.

VIA [ io9 ]

The Hoya firefighter’s assistant robot looks like (but isn’t) a stubbier version of the Recon Scout tactical surveillance robot. It’s designed to be let loose in buildings that are on fire to search for people and transmit information back to firefighters, including live video with sound, temperature data, and some kind of smoke data. The Hoya robot differs from the Recon Scout in that it’s more compact, and has a neat little fold-out rear wheel that makes the whole 3 pound package even more compact. Oh, and it’s also waterproof and can withstand temperatures of up to 320 degrees.

It’s a great idea to have a little surveillance robots for firefighters, but while you’re at it, why not have it actually fight fires? I mean, QinetiQ robots do it, Rovio does it, Anna Konda does it, there’s even an entire event at RoboGames for firefighting robots. So give this guy a little squirt gun, and make him feel useful.

VIA [ Crave ]

Remember those tourism promo vids for the Japanese city of Hakodate that featured a giant robot fighting a giant squid? Well, phase two of the campaign included the construction of these robot squids, which were on display at CEATEC Japan 200. I don’t know if they do anything, but they sure do look tasty. Another one, after the jump. (Read more…)

Hatsune Miku isn’t a real person. She’s not even a robot … She’s a computer generated persona called a Vocaloid, and she’s a Japanese pop star. Like, for real. And she’s famous enough that the HRP-4C android chick turned into a sort of reverse-avatar for her, and put on a couple performances at CEATEC in Japan, complete with an aqua wig with improbably long pigtails:

Hm. Honestly, I think I prefer the original… More emotion, less creepiness:

This music is completely computer generated, remember… And if you buy the software package, you can get the Vocaloid to sing whatever you want. Robot not included.

VIA [ Robot Watch (Translated) ]

I’m all for emotional support robots, especially soft and fluffy ones that look like baby seals. This robot pillow, though, goes a little too far. It’s called Funktionide, and was designed by Stefan Ulrich after a two month research project by our favorite German bio-inspired robotics company, Festo.

The “Funktionide” is an autarkic amorph object whose intention is to provide the user with a atmosphere of presence thus counteracting the feeling of loneliness.

Firstly, if this thing crawled into bed with me, it would cure my loneliness but probably not with a sense of what you’d call relief. Maybe, terror. And secondly, inventing words isn’t fair.

[ Funktionide ] VIA [ Eggshell Robotics ]

Robot Watch picked up some video of Nissan’s robot cars that we wrote about on Monday. If anything, they’re cuter than I thought they’d be, with the welcome addition of a bunch of blinky lights.

VIA [ Robot Watch ]