Oh sure, we joke about rogue AI all the time, and we're aware that we'll probably pollute ourselves to death well before the robots get us, but who really thinks flesh-eating machines are a good idea? Has Morpheus taught us nothing? The (patently evil) scientists behind the EATR project -- no fair, they're making their own jokes now too -- say the reconnaissance bot is powered by foraging for and consuming biomatter, which to you and us simply means soft, pulsating, yummy humans. They call it fuel versatility, as gasoline, diesel, and solar power may also be used if available, yet we'll offer no prizes for predicting which energy source these chainsaw-equipped robots will prefer.

[Via Switched]

Remember Intel's shape shifting matter concepts? Well, those realty-bending cats at DARPA are looking to put their own spin on it with a Programmable Matter program of their own. As is their mantra, the long-term goals are pretty wild: researcher Dr. Mitchell R. Zakin is hopeful they can one day build a container that looks like a paint can and will form universal spare parts or tools such as hammers and wrenches based on the soldiers' needs, using a building material they call "mesomatter" that range anywhere from one hundred microns to a centimeter in size. Currently five months into the program's second phase, there's still another fifteen to go before they move on. By then, the group expect to be able to use the technology and assemble four or five different three-dimensional solids. Best be careful, if this falls in the wrong hands, we'll have more "leaked iPhone" images ever previously thought possible.

[Via Wired]

Remember the LANDroids initiative, which resulted in iRobot scoring a $2.5 million contract to create tiny, miniaturized bots that could crawl through battlefields and your nightmares? The company is showing off the early fruits of that contract, the Ember microbot, which is so small it slipped entirely under our radar. It's not quite as tiny as DARPA seemed to hope, which depicted a bot little bigger than a pack of cards, but shrinking a Packbot down to paperback size is no small task -- even it is a James Clavell paperback. The bot's primary function is to set up a roving military network on the battlefield, but, with an integrated webcam and extension via USB and SDIO, who knows what kind of functionality they'll provide. The goal is to get these down to $100 or less, and for that price we could see plenty of civilians investing in these just to keep an eye on the activities of household pet insurgents.

[Via Robot Stock News]

We're no strangers to crazy DARPA projects around here, but this one especially strikes our fantastic fancy. The agency's researchers are currently undertaking a project -- called Silent Talk -- to "allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals." That's right: they're talking about telepathy. Using an EEG to read brain waves, DARPA is going to attempt to analyze "pre-speech" thoughts, then transmit them to another person. They first plan to map people's EEG patterns to his / her individual words, then see if those patterns are common to all people. If they are, then the team will move on to developing a way to transmitting those patterns to another person. Dream big, that's what we always say!

Boston Dynamics -- which previously made a robot called the BigDog -- has been enlisted by Sandia National Laboratories (a US government-funded lab) and DARPA to make a new, hopping robot. Called the Precision Urban Hopper, the robot's goal will be to be capable of jumping over large obstacles in city combat situations. It will boast one extremely tough leg to assist it, in addition to its four wheels. The Hopper is supposedly going to be able to jump 25 feet in the air once completed. So far, only a very small prototype (pictured above) is finished, but Boston Dynamics is due to present its next model sometime during 2010.

It's not easy to find research in the field of robotics without military applications (or military funding), and Brown University's latest is certainly no exception. Starting out with iRobot's PackBot (and some pocket change from DARPA and the Office of Naval Intelligence) researchers at the school have achieved several advances that will someday produce robots that follow both verbal and nonverbal commands from a human operator, indoors and out, without the need for a controlled environment or special clothing. The goal, according to Chad Jenkins, is to develop a robot that acts "like a partner. You don't want to puppeteer the robot. You supervise it, 'Here's your job. Now, go do it.'" The work is being presented this week at the Human-Robot Interaction conference in San Diego, but if you can't make it we've provided a video of the thing in action just for you (after the break). We for one salute our autonomous robot overlords.

[Via PhysOrg]

We had a chance to play around with Avaak's new multi-camera wireless video system, the Vue, and we've got to say -- it's kind of neat. The technology -- originally funded by DARPA and developed by the company for the military -- uses a mesh network (dubbed FrameMesh) to allow up to 50 cameras to communicate with a single base station. The premise is simple, you connect the included base to your router, then switch on as many of the cameras as you like; each one feeds its signal back home, then straight to your account on the company's servers where you can monitor the videos remotely. Once the video hits the page (the cameras stay off until you're actually watching something), you can record, or share them via Facebook, Flickr, etc. The cameras themselves are tiny things, and each one perches on a magnetized base where they can be adjusted to almost any position. The basic kit will run you $299, which includes the base station and two cameras, and each additional camera is $99. Not the lowest point of entry, but if you're into seriously monitoring some things, this is an insanely simple way to do it -- and we can't wait to see what installation artists get up to with these guys. Check out some hands-on pics in the gallery, then enjoy a brief video demo after the break.

Remember that DARPA initiative from a few years back to create cyborg insects? With funding from the agency, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have managed to control a rhinoceros beetle via radio signals, demonstrated in a flight test shown on video at this week's IEEE MEMS 2009 conference. A module placed on the arthropod uses six electrodes affixed to the brain and muscles to commandeer its free will. The device weighs 1.3g -- much less than the 3g payload these guys can handle, and with enough wiggle room to attach sensors for surveillance. Ultimately, scientists say they want to use the beetle's own sensors -- namely, its eyes -- to capture intel and its own body energy to power the apparatus. Keep an eye on this one, we expect it to play a major role in the impending robots vs. humans war.

[Thanks, Mimosa]