Have you ever been listening to music in your living room, only to move into another part of your house and realize you can’t hear your tunes very well? Sure, you could walk all the way back and pick up your MP3 player and bring it with you, or just turn on a radio, but who wants to do that when there’s the Ampbot?

Sega-Hasboro has created the Automated Music Personality Robot for the sole purpose of bringing you music wherever you go. Utilizing a Segway-like self-balancing system it can follow you around blasting tunes from the back-mounted MP3 player. The hands are actually a mixing deck, for when you feel your creative juices flowing.

The Ampbot isn’t available until this Fall, and will retail for $745. Don’t forget to stock up on batteries too. This bot is going to need six D and three AAA batteries to keep it running. I’m a bit baffled as to why they wouldn’t’ just use a rechargeable lithium ion battery instead. Changing out all of those batteries will get old quick.

VIA [ Dvice ]

This adorable little teddy bear is nothing less than a fully equipped GPS guidance system for your car. In fact, he is more than fully equipped. He’s borderline over equipped. In addition to providing verbal directions, the one foot tall robot has six motorized joints in his head and neck which allow him to gesture which direction to turn while he’s talking to you. If you stroke his head, he’ll tell you about any interesting things nearby, like landmarks. Now, here’s where the over equipped part comes in: if you stop (or accelerate) suddenly, he’ll start complaining (”watch out!”). And if he smells alcohol on your breath (yes, he’ll be sniffing you), he’ll say, “you haven’t been drinking, have you?” If you don’t admit to it, he’ll punch you in the face and then issue you a DUI.

Just kidding about that last part, but he could conceivably prevent you from starting your car until you pass his Breathalyzer test. Teddy’s designers, iXs Research Corporation, would like to have a smaller version on the market next year, and he won’t be just a teddy bear. You’ll be able to choose from a variety of characters, or a purely robotic version that hopefully you’ll be able to clothe in whatever friendly costume you can tolerate taking directions from.

VIA [ Pink Tentacle ]

What’s round, travels in straight lines until it runs into walls, and likes to eat stuff? That’s right, Roomba. And Pac-Man. And especially Pacmba, A Roomba covered in LEDs by Ron Tajima to make a Pac-man shape. Nom nom nom.

VIA [ GetRobo ]

It may not be quite as slick looking (or as sinister) as the Cyberdyne exoskeleton, but Berkeley Bionics’ lower body exoskeleton is firmly off the drawing board and into the prototype stage, and you can preorder one for yourself to help kick your status as a 98 pound weakling. The HULC (Human Universal Load Carrier) is able to take up to 200 pounds of load off of your back, augmenting your muscle movements so that you feel as though you’re not carrying anything at all. If you want to go anywhere, it’s still going to take some work to move that extra mass, but the HULC will also help to decrease the metabolic cost of moving a load by 10-15%, which means that you can move more heavier stuff farther.

There aren’t any more details on the Berkeley Bionics website (no price, for example) and the promo video looks like the target users are military rather than civilian. It could be that Berkeley Bionics is just looking to sell some prototype HULC systems to raise a little bit of money, but who cares, now is your big chance to start working on that superhero (or supervillain) cyborg suit you’ve been fantasizing about.

[ Berkeley Bionics ] VIA [ IEEE ]

This spunky little robodude is a Panasonic Evolta promotional mascot. He’s 17 centimeters tall and weighs 130 grams, and his reason for existing is summed up nicely in this picture… The two batteries on his back (Panasonic Evolta batteries, of course) were enough to power him up 1700 feet of vertical rope dangling over a cliff into the Grand Canyon. It only took him about 7 hours, which I guess is pretty quick for such a little guy. The Evolta batteries have been recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest lasting AAs anywhere ever, which is good to know, but you can’t actually GET them outside of Japan yet.

VIA [ Pink Tentacle ]

We introduced you to Monty last year at RoboDevelopment, and it looks like he’s made some progress… Instead of doing your cleaning for you, Monty has figured out how to delegate his responsibilities to other, less complicated forms of robotic life. Namely, a Roomba. It’s an interesting move; as soon as robots figure out how great robots are at mindless manual labor, robots will start getting themselves robots to do all the robot work for them. And where does that leave us? Yeah, probably cowering in a corner somewhere.

[ Anybots ]

This is Cyberdyne’s HAL (hybrid assistive limb) exoskeleton, a powered robotic suit designed to significantly increase the strength of the wearer. Using sensors attached to the skin, HAL senses which muscles you intend to move, and powers its joints at the same rate as you move yours, allowing you to walk around effortlessly while wearing the fifty pound suit. If you pick something up, the suit is able to compensate for a portion of the weight, effectively increasing your strength from 2 to 10 (!) times. The suit can be used indoors or outdoors and will provide power for between about three to five hours before it needs a recharge.

Prototypes of the HAL exoskeleton have been around for a few years, and Cyberdyne just begun to construct a new facility that should be able to produce 400 - 500 suits per year by the end of 2008, ramping up to tens of thousands of suits (!!) over the next few years. The best news is that the suits will be available for individual users overseas to rent (that’s us), for an estimated $1,000 per month which includes $300 for maintenance and upgrades. Is that a sweet deal or what? Sign me up, I’ll take one for Christmas.

[ Cyberdyne ] VIA [ Loving The Machine ]

You know why I don’t have a pool? It’s certainly not because I don’t have a large enough backyard. Or money. Or the desire to be cold and wet. No, it’s because keeping it clean would be really, really annoying. The Solar Breeze helps you out by automatically skimming the inevitable and unending gunk off the water all by itself. This, apparently, is trickier than it seems, and the Solar Breeze has special paddles to gently lift debris into interior bins without causing it to sink. The paddles also push it around the pool, focusing on the downwind edges where stuff is likely to accumulate. The Solar Breeze is powered completely by the sun, and also includes a chemical dispenser to help keep the water clean (although it only cleans the surface). It’s not going to give your pool as comprehensive of a cleaning as an iRobot Verro, but it is only $500 and you don’t have to plug it in to anything.

[ Solar Breeze ] VIA [ Crave ]

I have no idea whether or not this is true, but it’s just plausible enough to be believable. And it’s funny. From a post on How To Get Rid Of Stuff:

A local exterminator came over to my house a few weeks ago after finding an investigation. He gave me a small robotic vaccum cleaner called the roomba for a week. It had a scheduler and a base charge unit that it automatically went to when the battery got low. The roomba dispatched to the room like 20 times a day. Mostly while I was at work. As worker ants came out behind the wall, the roomba rolled over them and swept them up. So every once in a while it would go off its charger, run for half an hour, and nuke 100+ ants coming out of the wall per session. After about 3 days, running unattended thoughout the day and night, it killed off all the foragers, leaving the queen to starve to death. It was a merciless killing machine. It also cleaned my floors.

Just imagine yourself in the six three pairs of shoes of these poor little ants, with a gigantic robot chasing you down, trying to exterminate you and your entire family. Yeah, sometimes I have dreams like that… It is, after all, only a matter of time.

VIA [ RSN ]

This little round robot is named ApriPoko. He’s an 11 inch tall, 5 pound prototype under development by Toshiba to be used as a voice-activated universal remote system. Place him somewhere within eyesight of your entertainment system, and whenever you use one of your remotes, ApriPoko will notice the IR signal, perk up, and ask you what you just did. When you tell him “I just kicked my massage chair up to Shiatsu” he’ll remember your voice and the IR code from the remote. Next time, you can speak the command, and ApriPoko will rebroadcast the IR signal back to the device. I imagine that you’ll be able to assign specific voice commands to different combinations of devices, like a preset for “let’s watch a movie” or “hey baby, how ’bout a drink?”

Ultimately, it may just be easier to pick up the remote and push the button, but Toshiba is hoping to have a viable product sometime soon… And I’d like to see a remote that’s as cute as this. Heck, I might even pay for it.

VIA [ Pink Tentacle ]