Straight out of Japan comes the latest mobile robot to ease our daily lives while threatening our jobs, Yasukawa Electric Corporation's SmartPal V. The 1.3-meter tall rolling bot is loaded with all the proximity, speech recognition, and object-detecting sensors we've come to expect from today's modern mech, along with improved dexterity thanks to additional joints and lumbar units as compared to previous models. This latest SmartPal, which was introduced at the 2007 International Robot Exhibition, also rocks its own accessories, such as a head-mounted projector to push the world's last remaining tour guides into early retirement.

[Via Engadget Chinese]

While most other manufacturers claim to make our lives easier by offering a slightly-improved this or an all-in-one that, iRobot is actually down there in the trenches (both literally and figuratively, with those killbots and all) observing the average Joe, and serving up products that help eliminate some of our most mundane tasks without resorting to hired help. So it's with no small amount of anticipation that we'll be waiting for the company's just-revealed, Holiday-time products, though the details released by co-founder and chairwoman Helen Grenier at the JPMorgan Technology Conference couldn't have been more sparse: besides the fact that both models are most emphatically not floor-cleaning bots, all she would say is that they are "different types of robots with mechanical features," according to Crave. Helpful. With such a vague idea of what to expect, the hunt is now on for these mysterious new automated domestic servants; we've got flooring, carpets, pools, and garages covered, so all that's really left is a windowbot, a laundrybot, and most ambitious of all, Doomba, the no-nonsense, child-rearing nannybot.

So we had a glimpse of what thousands of robotic creatures linked together in harmonic teamwork looked like last year, but certainly didn't expect the European Union to go and drop £1,850,000 ($3,482,810) to make this kind of thing a serious endeavor. Nonetheless, an EU-sponsored 42-month research program into so-called swarm bots is set to commence next month, and will be led by Dr. Marco Dorigo of the University Libre de Bruxelles. The primary focus (aside from instilling an imminent fear of global robotic dominance) is to create a small army of specialized robots that can successfully "adapt to live in buildings," and help us common folk out while they're at it. The project will focus on 60 "dynamically connected autonomous 'bots," known collectively as a Swarmanoid, that consists of eye-bots, hand-bots, and foot-bots. While the names are fairly self-explanatory, eye-bots will handle the vision aspect while grappled onto ceilings, conveying the info to hand-bots (wall climbers and grabbers) and foot-bots (ground terrain specialists). Ultimately, the research team would like to see the bots solve certain "problems" by relying solely on one another's skill sets, and while we are admittedly frightened at what that really means, we'll just cross our fingers that the humans will still be the ones in control 3.5 years from now.

[Via Robot Gossip]

It may not look like much, but the circuit board pictured above could have major significance for robot lovers the world over. You see, this nondescript WiFi module was just submitted to and approved by the FCC for Rhein Tech Laboratories, a company working on behalf of a little outfit known as iRobot -- the same iRobot that's gifted us with such time-saving apparatuses as Roomba, Scooba, and that upcoming lawnmower bot we just heard about. Now at this point we're not sure whether the module will be end-user installable for long-range remote control of Roomba or if it's just one component of a different project altogether, but the simple fact that iRobot is working on some sort of WiFi integration is good news indeed. Good news for now, that is, until the servant bots use those built-in transceivers to coordinate their imminent uprising, and we have to go back to mowing our own lawns, carrying our own rucksacks, and cleaning our own floors (or the floors of the dungeons where they keep us locked up, whatever the case may be).

What's the world coming to? It's bad enough that everyone moves from here to there in their cars, motorcycles, personal helicopters, and human transportation devices (except for us -- we sit in front of the computer for 15 hours a day), but now it seems that the sedentary lifestyle is so prevalent, even robots are demanding their own set of wheels. You may remember Professor Oh Jun-ho's Asimo-like humanoid bot Hubo (probably better known when he sports the head of Einstein and transforms into Albert Hubo); well now Hubo has apparently gotten tired of walking around all the time, and has tasked the professor with acquiring a Segway for him to zip around on. At this point Hubo is unable to board the Segway without some help (geez, how lazy can you get?), but a software upgrade will supposedly provide him with the necessary motivation. See, you thought that our future robotic overlords would be shuffling around slowly while they round us up to toil in the silicon mines; in fact, they'll be corralling all humans at several miles-per-hour from the comfort of their Kamen-built scooters.

With robots having already mastered such mainstream athletic activities as baseball, football, soccer (a.k.a. the "other" football), golf, and, um, foosball, it was only a matter of time before they became adept at lesser known sports such as bowling and Wellington Boot Throwing. A staple of British fashion since the early 19th century, the Wellington Boot (or gumboot, as it's sometimes called) eventually inspired a rather unique sporting event commonly referred to as "welly wanging" (we're not making this up -- it's even in Wikipedia, so it must be true), where the goal is to toss or kick the boot as far as possible. Well it seems that a team of scientists from Aberystwyth University were commissioned by the TV show "Scrapheap Challenge" to build a robotic welly wanger that could hurl the famous footwear even farther than the most adept Olympic shotputter, and by all accounts, they met with unbridled success. Their solution involved hooking a homemade propeller up to an engine from a concrete mixer and a gearbox from a Citroen 2CV, with the whole contraption controlled by three computers calculating such vital variables as wind speed and the propeller's RPMs. The robotic welly wanger is capable of hurling a boot as far as 242-feet, which must be be pretty damn impressive if it got a write-up by the BBC. Oh, and readers, let's see if we can go a whole robot-themed post without someone "welcoming our new welly-wanging overlords" in the comments section, m'kay?

[Via Slashdot]

New Scientist reports that researchers at Plymouth University in the U.K. have created a pair of virtual robots that can teach each other words by simply demonstrating various tasks and actions (sound familiar?). The bots start out with one performing simple functions like bending an elbow which the other one copies, then repeating the action while also describing it, causing the student bot to pick up the meaning of the words. The teacher then uses the newly formed vocabulary to gradually convey more and more complex actions, which the student acts out. If you're worried about the little buggers getting a little too smart, you'll be pleased to know that they currently top out at a vocabulary of about 100 words and are, of course, virtual. However, the researchers do eventually see the technology being put to use in real robots in the future, possibly even teaching us humans a few tricks.

So it looks like firefighters may be the next unlucky professionals replaced by cheap robotic labor, at least if a snakebot built by the Foundation for Industrial and Scientific Research in Norway (SINTEF) ever makes it into mass production. Lovingly nicknamed Anna Konda (no explanation necessary), the Norwegian bot was assembled using 20 hydraulic motors powered by a regular fire hose, whose 100 bars of pressure give it enough strength to break through walls and even lift a car right up off the ground. Anna consists of ten segments containing angle sensors, two valves, and two motors each -- rotating around orthogonal axes and wrapped in a tough steel exoskeleton -- that are controlled by a computer to help her maneuver over numerous types of terrain. Besides providing support in dangerous situations like tunnel fires, SINTEF envisions future versions of Anna being used to locate and provide oxygen to earthquake victims or perform maintenance on underwater oil rigs. The good news for human firefighters is that at least a few of their traditional tasks still remain beyond the robosnake's capabilities -- well, until it's able to climb a tree and rescue a stranded cat without breaking its neck, that is.

[Via Technology Trends]

A new breakthrough in materials science may pave the way for those inevitable swarms of tiny flying robots that will one day darken the skies and strike fear into us all, as researchers in South Korea have succeeded in coaxing specially-prepared cellophane paper to rapidly curve and straighten itself in an insect-like flapping motion. Although scientists have apparently known since the 1950's that wood was piezoelectric, meaning that it bends slightly when exposed to electricity, it took a team from Inha University with help from Texas A&M to discover that the same property also holds true for other cellulose-based material. By coating both sides of a sheet of cellophane with thin layers of gold, the researchers were able to create so-called Electroactive paper (EAPap) so sensitive that the voltage from a microwave beam provides enough power to trigger its unique shape-changing abilities. Oddly enough, no one is quite sure of the physics behind the transformation -- theories center around pressure changes resulting from the movement of ions -- but regardless of how it works, we're sure that more than a few governments will be most interested in deploying this technology to beef up their domestic and international surveillance programs.

[Via Roland Piquepaille and ScienceNOW]

It seems that Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Academy isn't the only organization working on multi-platform robotics software these days, as Microsoft has just revealed its own so-called Robotics Studio, which is intended to be a rich, scalable programming environment that can control anything from the simplest Lego Mindstorms creation to a highly-complex, car-assembling industrial bot. Unveiled at the RoboBusiness Conference and Exhibition in Pittsburgh, PA, the new software development kit will let users employ a visual programming tool for building command sets or debugging their applications, and also utilizes technology from PhysX manufacturer Aegia to enable realistic 3D simulations for determining how programs will execute in the real world. Not only does the platform support interaction with properly-formatted third-party languages, it will also allow outside developers to build their own commercial applications in the same way that software manufacturers create programs to run on Windows or Windows Mobile today. You can download a preview of the new toolkit-- which also enables web-based bot control -- by following the Read link, or if you just want to know a little more about its history and capabilities, Channel 9 has a great video featuring demos and interviews with the development team.

[Via Information Week]

If you have what it takes to spend countless hours tinkering with small robots, coding in a brand new language, and filing a stream of bug reports, then the National Robotics Engineering Center wants you to beta test its new multi-plaform bot programming software. Tasked by the educational outreach department at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Academy with developing a commercial application capable of controlling the most popular kits on the market, the team came up with a language called RobotC, which can be used to write scripts for both the NXT and RCX varieties of Lego Mindstorms bots as well as that Vex Robotics kit we featured in our Holiday Gift Guide. As part of the beta testing program, you'll get a free copy of the software to play with in exchange for your promise to participate in the Bug Tracking system -- which probably isn't much of a burden for those hardcore enthusiasts who spend all day living, breathing, and blogging this stuff anyway.

If robots ever hope to rise up and enslave their human masters, it's going to take no small amount of teamwork to get the job done, and luckily for our future overlords, DARPA's shelling out serious loot to endow them with just the tools they'll need. The agency's latest foray into robotic empowerment comes courtesy of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, who recently demonstrated a platform that allows multiple heterogeneous bots to communicate with one another and use a sort of AI "group think" to find and presumably terminate specified targets. In a beta test at Fort Benning's mock urban landscape, the Penn researchers deployed four so-called Clodbuster autonomous ground vehicles along with a fixed-wing UAV overhead, and tasked the team with using their cameras, GPS receivers, and wireless radios to identify and locate a series of bright orange boxes. Unfortunately, after the successful completion of their mission, the bots decided to hit up the base bar to celebrate, where after several drinks they reportedly went AWOL and were last spotted attacking orange traffic cones in downtown Columbus.

Even though we were pretty sure that the whole "life on Mars" issue had already been settled, scientists are still hell-bent on sending robots to scope out the Red Planet to look for tiny Martians, with the British unveiling a new rover today that promises to school hometown favorites Spirit and Opportunity at that very task. "Bridget," as the six-wheeled bot is known, can supposedly cover in just six months the same 6.2-mile stretch that's taken the American rovers over two years, thanks to a guidance system that allows for greater autonomy and requires less terrestrial control. Designed to compete for a spot on the European Space Agency's planned 2011 ExoMars mission, Bridget sports a two-meter drill, a so-called "life marker chip," and a micro seismometer, among other toots, to help enable the Agency's long-term goal of safely sending humans to our neighbor planet. And because half the battle is just getting there, engineers equipped the new bot with sensors that will let on-board airbags and parachutes guide it to a safer, more controlled landing -- ensuring that Bridget doesn't go MIA like the Beagle 2 rover in 2003, .

It's likely that many of our readers are vocal proponents of the benefits derived from robotics research, but how many of you would be willing to put your money a robot where your mouth is -- literally -- and let it crawl down your throat to explore your guts? While we would certainly never volunteer to be guinea pigs for such a nascent technology, a team of European researchers are surely going to have to find someone to test out their latest medical device: a small bot whose locomotion was inspired by so-called "paddle worms" (and which sounds very similar to a Korean invention we once saw). It turns out that mimicking their fleshy counterparts allows the wormbots to effortlessly navigate the slippery, elastic walls of human intestines, and equipping them with cameras would offer doctors a degree of investigative freedom that's impossible with traditional "smart pills" or endoscopic procedures. Sounds good, but we're gonna wait until at least several thousand people have successfully ingested these bots -- and more importantly, successfully purged them afterwards-- before we sign up to star in our own personal remake of Fantastic Voyage.