I was too busy taking a nap to watch the Super Bowl, but fortunately the important parts of it are now up on YouTube. For what it’s worth, Intel, with the amount of money that this commercial probably cost you, I bet you could have made an actual Jeffrey.

Jeffrey has his own Facebook page, of course, complete with vacation photos and wisecracks in binary. Here’s his bio:

Activities: Beeping, moving around stiffly, applying logic to problems, speaking in monotone, computin’ and figurin’, weightlifting

Interests: Binary Code, Quantum theory, sensory robotics, differential calculus, grilled cheese sandwiches, muscle cars, full contact chess, flight simulator games, number crunching and going for long rolls on the beach.

Favorite Movies: Terminator, Short Circuit, Tron, Star Wars, The Matrix, Iron Giant, A.I, and the Ernest series.

Favorite Music: Daft Punk, Crystal Method, Rush, Moby, Fatboy Slim, Massive Attack, The Zep, Chemical Brothers. Pretty much all electronica. And Crunk.

Favorite Books: I, Robot; 1984; old Commodore 64 user manuals (still hilarious).

Favorite TV Show:
Battlestar Gallactica, Robot Chicken, Star Trek, Lost, Battle Bots, Top Chef, Jeopardy,The Jetsons, America’s Next Top Rocket Scientist and Anderson Cooper 360

Mmm, grilled cheese sandwiches… I like this robot.

[ Jeffrey @ Facebook ] VIA [ HowToWeb on Twitter ]

Crap, it’s two of my favorite things trying to destroy each other… I can’t possibly choose who I want to win, just toss me in the middle and let me get torn to shreds by a tornado of cuteness and robotyness.

[ Powerpig @ Flickr ] VIA [ Robots.net ]

[ XKCD ]
[ FIRST Robotics ]

Pay attention kids: If you want to grow up to be a robot, or a robot builder, or both at the same time, listen to C-3PO:

Like robots, you should only smoke when you’re on fire. And you’d better hope that unlike robots, being on fire is not a common thing for you.

Yeah, it’s hard to top Keanu.

VIA [ Gearfuse ]

Someone from the CKBot group at UPenn’s Modlab spent the summer at Willow Garage and decided to leave an impression on a researcher there by hiding an armed and questionably dangerous robot in the ceiling of his cubicle. A remote control raises a cutout section of ceiling tile, and the robot fires ping pong balls down at the hapless human below.

Obviously, this is a capability that PR2 needs to be endowed with to be successful in the workplace… I’m sure someone is getting right on that.

[ Modlab ]
[ Willow Garage ]

A Google image search for “Roomba spoiler” turned up nothing. Maybe these guys can whip up something that is also somehow useful… Or not useful. I’d still buy one.

[ Questionable Content ]

I wouldn’t put it past Data to do a little bit of experimenting, but C-3PO? That’s shocking. I am officially scandalized. And so is R2-D2, who’s probably going to come after Data with that silly little tazer of his. This shirt was designed by Joanna Mulder, and you can pick it up for $20 on her Etsy page, if you hurry.

VIA [ io9 ]

The video that includes Boston Dynamics’ BigDog getting kicked and slipping on ice is nothing new, and it’s still one of the best robot videos I’ve ever seen. The vid above includes that stuff, but also some footage that I don’t think we’ve seen before of BigDog descending slopes and getting its foot caught in a concrete block. It’s all very impressive, but even more importantly, it’s damn funny stuff.

[ BigDog ]

Yeah, even in 1972 Sesame Street knew where it was at… Poor S.A.M. coulda used a GPS, though. That strange cement mixer was a tramp.

“We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassins patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future.”

Almost the future, but not quite… We’re transitioning out of the age of computers and into the age of robotics. Or we will be soon. Just remember that it’s not all about fleets of robot assassins, it’s also about helping people, and making things possible that were never possible before.

[ XKCD ]