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PaPeRo : Shibuya girls' favorite robot
While we tend to prefer more aggressive robots, or more sporty robots, most of the 500 Shibuya girls surveyed in the latest issue of Robot Life tend to prefer kawaii (um, cuteness). The champion of the informal 500 person poll was PaPeRo, a short stubby little mini robot that looks like the lovechild of R2D2 and the Fighting Nun puppet. PaPeRro, whom we fell in love with at CeBIT, beat out such competitors as the security guard bot Wakamaru and the ifBot, an elderly-friendly little droid. We still think that PaPeRo should enter the Robo-One in the Space competition, which is totally feasible since it has few years to work it out and get in fighting shape. Click on for the list of today's best robots, as rated by a ton of Japanese ladies.[Via Wired Blogs]
Robot draws happy face, gets angry
You know, in the future, people will shout from their rooftops: "A robot! A robot! My kingdom for a robot!" Ok, maybe not, but with apologies to our favorite playwright, robots seem to be everywhere these days. We just came across this video of a very child-like Robonova that drops to its knees, wields a mean marker, and draws a crude happy face, and then scratches it out. Not the most useful of robots, but a good first step. Next thing you know, they'll be teething and speaking in complete -- oh, wait. Maybe Robonova and Actroid should get together, producing a robot that would recite our RSS feed and draw the Engadget logo. Now that would be a robot.
Make's coverage of RoboGames 2006
Having already blown our entire travel budget attending CES, E3, and various other important events in sunny locations, we weren't able to scrape together the funds to hit up this year's annual RoboGames festival in San Francisco, but luckily Make magazine/blog has filled in the void by providing some excellent coverage. Formerly known as the ROBOlympics, the event has grown to over 20 categories and demonstrations, covering some of the same territory we saw at the Eastern Canadian Robot Games -- such as sumo wrestling, fire-fighting, and line-following -- but also throwing in a little RoboCup-style soccer football, a new 3-on-3 hockey tournament, and even a trio of so called Tetsujin events in which otherwise unathletic individuals sport hydraulic mech suits which enable them to perform amazing feats of speed, strength, and dexterity. Besides sponsoring a display table among the likes of Lego and NASA, Make also has its Media Maker Bre Pettis filing daily videocasts and flickr photosets from the scene, featuring such Engadget faves as Vstone's Robovie-M, Kondo's KHR-1, and HiTec's Robonova as well as several other non-competitive models like Mark Sherman's snakebot and a rig that can play and seemingly defeat children at Connect Four. You can follow the links below to get a feel for all the action, and stay tuned to Make because Day 3 coverage is only starting to trickle in.Read- RoboGames siteRead- Make @ RoboGamesRead- RoboGames Day 1Read- RoboGames Day 2
