Kokoro, a Japanese animatronics and robot company, has unveiled the Actroid F telepresence robot, a full sized, incredibly life-like female telepresence robot designed to interact with remote participants while mimicking your facial expressions.
A senior astronomer working for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program has recently expressed what a lot of scientists expect these days: If we ever do make contact with aliens, chances are they’ll be intelligent machines and not biological systems like us.
We were hoping NASA’s first robot astronaut, Robonaut 2 or R2, would get a stylish sci-fi type launch into space, perhaps sitting next to human astronauts. But it turns out, reality is rarely as glamorous as the movies.
A new $444 million hospital opening in Scotland will be using robots rather than human to do menial jobs such as bringing meals and dispensing drugs. The robots will underneath the hospital and use service elevators, coming out only to do the aforementioned chores, and other little jobs like disposing of garbage and cleaning rooms.
The German Aerospace Center have developed a robot that a human operator can control from Earth, or perhaps from orbit, that can perform tasks in space that would be too dangerous for an astronaut.
The BP oil spill has been in the headlines for a while now, with no sign of the situation improving and public frustration about to reach a boiling point. But one reason we may feel like nothing is getting done is that humans aren’t the ones doing it. Robots are on the front lines doing the bulk of the work in containing the oil gushing out.
Instead of going the traditional route of writing up a boring 50 page dissertation for his final year at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China, student Bi Heng chose to build a realistic-looking 4-ton, $43,000 Transformer-inspired sculpture honoring legendary Chinese general Guan Yu. The giant robot stands 32 feet tall, and was assembled from the parts of an old Jiefang brand vehicle, a 25-year-old military service truck employed by the People’s Liberation Army.
Check out this mechanical fish that’s guiding a shoal of actual fish across a pool. The fish was designed by New York University’s Poly’s Dynamical Systems Laboratory, and the developers say that it could one day be used to guide real fish away from man-made ecological disasters.