The future of robotics is here. It’s **drum roll** cockroaches? Texas A&M University’s Nuclear Security Science and Policy Institute (say that 10 times fast!) is developing technology that allows cockroaches to be controlled via a tiny chip on a cockroach’s back that sends electrical signals to make the roach move. “It’s like a cattle prod for cockroaches,” says William Charlton, an associate professor at Texas A&M.

But why cockroaches? Well, the same chip that communicates remotely with a computer to prod the roach has several types of radiation sensor, meaning that it can detect whether conditions in a given area are safe for humans.

“Cockroaches really are the perfect medium for this,” says William Charlton, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at the university and a principal investigator on the project. “They can go for extraordinarily long periods of time without food. They exist on every continent except Antarctica. They’re very radiation resistant, and they can carry extremely large amounts of weight compared to their body mass.”

If Charlton gets his way, we’ll have mini-armies of 20 or so roaches surveying areas as large as one square kilometer, all controlled by remote operators, all reporting data about chemical conditions in the area.

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords

It may look almost cartoonish in proportion, but the picture above is the real deal. How long till we see “Control Your Own Cockroach” kits for the kids?

[ NDIA ] VIA [ Wired ]

I’m not sure whose idea it was to put some poor kid’s dolls inside this maze, but it’s a good thing that a bunch of very capable robots are competing to find them all. RoboCup Rescue (the video above was taken at a German warm-up event) challenges robots to navigate and map a complex 150 square meter three dimensional maze of blocks, stairs, and pipes that simulates a disaster area… Something like what my office will look like when the next big quake hits San Francisco. Anytime now. No? Not yet? Okay, moving on.

The dolls wiggle around, make noise, emit CO2, and get warm, just like real babies/people. The robots are completely autonomous, and are scored both on how many dolls they find and how accurate of a map they construct while doing so. Currently, the time it takes for autonomous robots to survey an area and then produce a map usable by search and rescue teams is on the order of 10-20 minutes, which is just too long to be practical, but as with everything else these days, faster/better/cheaper is a future inevitability.

[ RoboCup Rescue ] VIA [ New Scientist ]

The U-Tsu-Shi-O-Mi humanoid robot’s purpose is to be a real, physical object that replicates in meatspace everything its virtual twin does in VR. It accomplishes this through computer animation and a special headset. The robot is outfitted with a green suit (presumably, this is similar to green screen technology used in movies), making him look like a creppy mannequin frog. If you are wearing the headset, you will see a person “painted on” the featureless green robot, so that as the robot moves and gestures and talks, the computer animation “sticks” to the robot and appears continuous to your eye. The robot even responds a bit if you do things, like say, touch its hand. In the video, you see a blue aura around the form, but I assume that is because they did not paint the sides of the form. It’s not a quantum leap to think that if they map the entire object, then what you have is a true 3-d virtual buddy, love slave or whatever you like.

The implications are amazing for both consumer and military use. Imagine the money to be made by virtually-pimping a stable of “girls” that are essentially software. The bonus for the consumer perv is that he or she would not only have the image, but the physical “doll” as well. Now imagine the military using this in the future for everything from training to assassination.

The video is a bit more disturbing then you might think. That’s thanks mostly to their choice of music. They show the whole creepy process and explain a bit more about the exoskeleton underneath the green suit.

Video and links after the jump…

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In yet another instance of bots imitating human life, scientists at the University of British Columbia have constructed surgical robots that they hope will perform the medical feats of the future. Since the future is not here yet, today they will be playing a large version of the “Operation” game.

Second-year students will work in teams and create prototype “surgeons”. The goal will be to see which robot can remove the most metal parts in two minutes. Of course, they have to be careful not to remove the wrong part and just like the classic game, try not to bump the sides of the “incisions”. They fail to mention whether a wrong move is accompanied by the familiar angry buzzer or not. The robots are being built completely from scratch and will be operated autonomously with no remote controls whatsoever.

Check out the video after the jump. It starts with a cartoon, has robots AND Operation. Need I say more?

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