A good 90% of our day is spent sitting in a chair delivering you non-stop gadget action, but that other 10% of our waking hours when we're forced to pursue nourishment, let the dog out, and make trips to the bathroom can be a real drag. What we wouldn't give for a chair like the lucky kids at Waseda University have built, a two-foot tall, bipedal "robot" that uses a combination of hydraulics and algorithms to saunter along fairly gracefully and even negotiate difficult terrain like the potentially-deadly household staircase. The WL-16IV, as this model is known (Waseda-Leg Number 16 Refinement Four, apparently) follows several earlier units by the same name, as well as an antiquated prototype from 2001 known called the WL-16. Hit the Read link for some good machine translation fun, or do yourself a favor and just head straight to the video of this dream chair in action.

Although Stephen Colbert hates bears, he might actually go for this one, given that it's designed to save lives, not destroy them. The Battlefield Extraction and Retrieval Robot is a new bipedal droid designed to carry injured soldiers off of the battle-charred landscape as far as an hour's distance. What's more, its lower legs can fold down to roll away on tank treads, which seems a vast improvement over the previous spider-like designs that we've seen lately. No word yet on if it's actually tried to carry a real live shell-shocked GI -- which might be a little different than a lifeless dummy -- but beyond military applications, Vecna Technologies intends to use the BEAR for more domestic purposes. On their site they also illustrated plans for the robot to help mobility-impaired patients as a home-living assistant, and even show it carrying tea in one diagram. You know, come to think of it we wouldn't object at all if one of these things showed up every now and again to refill our tea mugs.

[Via Roland Piquepaille]

There are already a number of bipedal or bipedal-like bots, exoskeletons, suits, assists, and devices, but Atsuo Takanishi's team at Waseda University, in conjunction with Japanese robot superpower tmsuk, unveiled their new WL-16RIII walkbot. We know they'd be a huge boon to the handicapped, elderly, lazy, and anime-obsessed the world over, but seriously, could you imagine actually walking into a grocery store or a job interview with this thing? We can, and if they cruised into the Engadget offices we'd just be all, "You're hired."