Yeah, so it goes about how you’d expect. The robot in the ring is the Genuine Great King Kizer, a 1 meter tall 9 kilo humanoid with 37 servos and 25 degrees of freedom. Every 18 months or so, designer Naoki Maru has doubled the size of this robot, which means that it’ll be playing soccer with Hajime 33 sometime in 2011.

Meantime, let’s get some industrial robots and see if one of them can pin the guy in the tight shorts. Or just, you know, crush him.

VIA [ GetRobo ]

This “mech-inspired” hexapod comes from Trossen Robotics Community member Zenta. You remember Zenta, right? The cool thing one of the cool things about this hexapod is that each of its legs has four (four!) degrees of freedom:

The mech-inspired bit does suggest that T-Hex may not ultimately be outfitted with an arsenal of weaponry and sent into battle in a Mech Warfare competition. Sadface.

[ T-Hex ] VIA [ Trossen ]

We posted a video on Monday of Shimon demonstrating his headbanging behavior, but there wasn’t much in the way of the marimba jamming that he’s famous for. The video we have today shows Shimon headbanging away while playing the marimba with all four of his arms along with an iPhone app called ZOOZbeat… If you’re interested in that, there’s a lite version available for free, and the full version is $1.

Robot sold separately.

[ ZOOZbeat ]
[ Shimon ]

Remember that Mindflex game from CES last year that used a little ball hovering on a jet of air? Well, if you use a more powerful jet of air and a fancy multi-axis robotic nozzle, you can manipulate objects in three dimensions through obstacle courses, toss things, hold up multiple objects, weigh objects, and even peel onions. It does it all!

The fluid dynamics involved in these manipulations, especially when you throw more than one object and non-spherical objects into the mix, are (I can only assume) pretty crazy. Stereo cameras track the object in the airstream, and a computer model directs the nozzle to vary the speed and direction of the jet to keep things stable.

The designers of the system, Aaron Becker and Robert Sandheinrich from University of Illinois, say that this technology could be used to handle flexible and delicate objects in a non-contact setting, but after seeing what the air jet did to that onion, I have to wonder whether putting a delicate object in that jet would be a good idea. Still, it does make an excellent onion peeler, and maybe if they turned it up a notch it might be able to do things like remove apple cores, juice oranges, or make meatloaf.

[ Aaron Becker ] VIA [ IEEE ]

Now, I’m not saying that there is never going to be a robot Armageddon, but this just goes to show that people have been predicting that such things are right around the corner for decades:

February 18, 1998:

DAVOS, Switzerland (CNN) — Could artificially intelligent robots signal the end of the human race? Some Swiss scientists say such a threat may be closer than we think.

Their doom and gloom talk was prompted by one of their own creations: an autonomous robot that learns from its environment.

Within a few minutes, the microprocessor based robot can learn not to bump into a barrier. No one programs the robot’s actions, and its creator isn’t exactly sure how it will behave in any given situation.

Within 10 years, they predict that similar but more advanced machines, equipped with artificial intelligence, will be as clever as humans. Soon after, they say, the man-made objects could become more intelligent than their creators — and capable of taking over.

“Next century’s global politics will be dominated by the question of should humanity build ultra-intelligent machines or not,” said Hugo de Garis, who’s already created an artificially intelligent machine.

“In fact, I’m going so far as saying there will be major warfare between these two major groups, one saying building machines is the destiny of the human species, something people should do and the other group saying it’s too dangerous,” de Garis said.

Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics — the science of comparing biological and computerized brains — agrees that thinking robots could be dangerous.

“I can’t see any reason why machines will not be more intelligent than humans in the next 20 to 30 years and that is an enormous threat,” Warwick said.

De Garis speculates that the robots might soon tire of their human creators.

“We could never be sure these artellects, as we call them — artificial intellects — wouldn’t decide that humanity is a pest and try to exterminate us, and they’d be so intelligent they could do it easily,” de Garis said.

Warwick has even gloomier premonitions.

“We’re talking in the future the end of the human race as we know it,” Warwick said.

The day when robots no longer do what we want them to may already be here.

De Garis’ machine quickly decided it was camera shy and refused to be filmed by a CNN crew.

Shy or not, only time will tell if these artificially intelligent machines will evolve enough to bring about our demise.

OMG! EVERYBODY PANIC ten years ago.

Progress is happening… In the last 10 years, all kinds of utterly crazy stuff has happened in the world of robotics. We’ve got robots with missiles and guns now, and robots that make all kinds of (sometimes scary) decisions without us. What isn’t happening is a robot apocalypse, or really any hint of one. I’d like to reiterate that there’s no reason why this isn’t something we should be concerned about, and legitimately… But it’s worth rational discussion, not dire predictions about “the end of the human race as we know it.”

[ CNN ]

You may wonder what exactly you pay for here on BotJunkie, so here’s an example… I managed to dig up an old directory listing from MIT’s artificial intelligence laboratory, which has since been absorbed into (or turned into) CSAIL. This directory contains a bunch of different projects ranging from about 1996 through 2004, which is ancient history when it comes to robotics. Many of the subdirectories are empty or broken, but I’ve sorted through it all and pulled out some choice pics of robots from long ago… Click on each picture to go to the antiquated and likely partially broken project page.

Attila, an experimental platform for autonomous planetary exploration

Ant, an experimental microrobot

Boadicea, a pneumatic walking robot

Coco, a fifteen DOF quadruped with gorilla-like proportions

A self-feeding robot, like this or this except eight years ago

And I don’t quite know what to make of this… Or this, for that matter.

At RoboExotica in Vienna (it’s the European version of this) one of the most entertaining robots this year was this Adult Mario system, a regular game of Mario hooked up to a booze dispenser that mixes you a drink based on how well you play. Do well, you get rum and coke. Do poorly, and the robot mixes in water. Run out of lives, and the robot throws the drink in your face.

Just kidding.

But there are other cool features, like fans that blow in your face when Mario runs and lighting that matches the background of the level you’re on. You can also swap cartridges (not really) and play Bartris instead:

Of course, the robot can be configured to mix any sort of drink using any sort of game. The possibilities are endless… Contra J├ñgerbombs, here I come.

[ Roboexotica ]
[ Nonpolynomial ] VIA [ DigitalTools ]

The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies fielded a poll last week asking people to respond to the following question: “If you had a personal robot that could do only one thing, which ability would you prefer it to have?” The results, as you can see above, put sexbots in a close second only to house cleaning robots, with everything else notably uninteresting to very many of the 500 respondents.

Personally, I’d like to know why the robot has to be a sex “slave” as opposed to a willing participant in a mutually satisfactory sexual relationship. Also, it’s curious to me that people are equally interested in having a robot that does their work for them, as they are in having a robot that replaces (traditionally) another human. Anyway, we told you so.

[ IEET ] VIA [ io9 ]

“Controlling the forces of nature has been a dream of humankind since time immemorial. With the CyberKite, Festo is meeting this challenge as part of the Bionic Learning Network and is developing a kite system with a cybernetic control unit.”

Why? Because robot penguin, that’s why!

But seriously, I have no idea, besides that it’s an interesting project to tackle… Although come to think of it, I suppose it could have some commercial applications, too.

[ Festo ]

If these weren’t already sold out, I’d be all over them. At $45 each (there’s a set of 6), these 6.5″ tall ‘Bertie Mk2′ figurines are beautifully battle scarred in that way that made Wall-E so endearing. More pics:

As I said, the pre-order is entirely sold out, but hopefully these robot toys will become available again in January.

[ Tenacious Toys ] VIA [ Boing Boing ]