Quadcopters are the new must-have toys of the tech-headed kids. They’re showing up everywhere and there are thousands of them out ‘in the wild’.

For those frightened that these things will eventually be controlled by SkyNet, this latest advancement in their abilities is only going to reinforce that paranoia.

For the rest of us who believe our robot friends would never hurt us based on a set of laws thrust into existence by an author of science fiction novels? This is pretty awesome to watch.

For a more detailed description of how exactly this whole process works, you can check out RoboHub for a more educational explanation than anything you’re ever going to find here.

Those that just want to be amazed at a serious demonstration of how organized, responsive, agile….

Know what? Forget we ever called those people paranoid.

[RoboHub.Org]

Across the globe from the uncanny valley that is Diego-san’s facial expressions, the University of Zurich’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory making another weird foray into the creation of a robot toddler.

Roboy is being developing with the help of crowd-funding,, sponsorships and almost 40 engineers and scientists.

Just like its weaker, fleshy, real-life inspiration, Roboy’s design gestation is going to take about 9 months to full completion.

Roboy is being developed to ease people into actually living with robots and not being creeped out by them. Roboy’s face was chosen during a Facebook contest. Its body is made entirely of plastic and will be covered with a fleshy, rubber-like material to simulate skin. Unlike typical robot movement mechanisms, Roboy will feature elastic cables pulled by motors in order to provide movement more human-like and less bad robot-dance-like.

Part of Roboy’s mission is to help build a bridge across the uncanny valley and get people more comfortable with having robots around and being a part of their lives.

Service robots are going to be a part of our lives in the very near future. As the population ages, new generations will already be more comfortable with having robots around and using them to do menial tasks for us.

Roboy will heading out into the world as part of the ‘Robots on Tour’ event that begins March and will exhibit all sorts of our future replacements.

Then there’s that incessant and nagging subconscious feeling that we might piss them off and see an army more terrifying than anything Hollywood could put in front of our peepers….

[Roboy]

Got an event coming up real soon? Maybe a wedding? Maybe a birthday?

Well in case you are and you’re wondering where to find memorable entertainment for your party? Look no further than Ebay.

Right now, because of a ‘changed business model’, you can now have an entirely Hillbilly band play at your event!

A petting zoo/amusement park in Massachusetts has decided to bid farewell to this frightening group of robotic performers designed and built by an ex-Disney Imagineer (we kinda get why he’s an ex-Imagineer).

Originally this band cost the company $15,000. They’re letting go of the whole group, including the porch if you dismantle it yourself, for a steal at $5,000! Total deal.

You only have a couple of days left to snag the entire group so you’ll have that special ‘something’ that leaves an impression on your event’s guests that they’ll never forget..

Like when they all suddenly stop playing, turn their heads to look at you with their unblinking stares and then quickly return to playing one of their beloved jigs.

[Ebay]

Featured on the cover of WIRED magazine this month, these little drones or “quadrotors” have been popping up everywhere lately.

The show in the video above features 16 of them performing some very cool computer-controlled aerial choreography using reflected light.

It’s some spectacular stuff to watch….until you realize this display is called ‘Meet Your Creator’…and until the kinda creepy ending…

Which we’re pretty sure is a signal to Skynet that it’s highly mobile flying army is ready.

[YouTube]

Many of you might remember Teddy Ruxpin as something of a tech marvel of the 80s. Teddy Ruxpin was like having your own Disney animatronic as a kid. Insert a cassette tape into his back, press play and Teddy Ruxpin would lip-sync to recordings of stories featuring his adventures…or to any of your favorite bands…or to Eddie Murphy’s Raw standup act. Any audio you could pipe into him, he’d lip-sync to.

Teddy Ruxpin is back…in probably the oddest, almost creepiest way possible…an art installation that reads posts from Twitter out loud.

Eighty Teddy Ruxpin’s have been wired and attached to a wall by Sean Hathaway as part of an installation called TED ( “Transformations, Emotional Deconstruction” ).

Here’s Hathaway’s explanation taken from his official site:

TED is a large, wall-based installation consisting of an array of 80 Teddy Ruxpin dolls that speak emotional content gathered from the web via synthetic speech with animated mouths. The speaking of the emotional content is accompanied by one of twenty-four musical vignettes that have been paired to the emotional content being spoken. Each vignette, representing one of twenty-four subtle variants of human emotion, have been composed in such a way that the beginnings and ends of the short pieces will seamlessly dogleg in any possible configuration and stream endlessly as a unified whole. The installation is allowed to drift about freely through the emotional landscape being driven only by those who are contributing content to the piece whether unwittingly or consciously. As such the overall presentation of the piece can vary greatly based on external conditions such as seasons, world events and even time of day.

Hathaway also states that, “The piece is essentially taking the instantaneous emotional pulse of the internet and this collective pulse, like a human pulse, varies over time,”

Below is a video of the installation at work.

Just don’t watch it before you lay your little precious head down for the night…it’ll probably change your pulse as well…but not in a good way.

[DigitalTrends]

Robots. They’re already everywhere just waiting for SkyNet to give the word.

Up until now they’ve all been land-based future threats to humanity…up until now.

Besides Bruce, the shark from the original Jaws movie, robots that take to water are about as rare as cats who enjoy a good shower. Specifically humanoid ones.

Swumanoid is about to change that.

Swumanoid, created by Chung Changhyun and Motomu Nakashima at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in order to measure water resistance.

Created using a 3D printer and featuring about 20 waterproof motors, Swumanoid is able to accurately perform a breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly, dog paddling and even tread water.

So if you’ve finally gotten over the whole “I’m scared of deep water because I don’t know what’s in there and it freaks me out” craze?

You now have something else to fear in the water besides a mechanical great white shark…

It’s name is Swumanoid.

[PlasticPals]

Dragging yourself to your morning coffee just got a whole lot easier. So did our baby steps toward becoming cyborgs.

Two quadriplegic volunteers, a 66 year-old man and a 58 year-old woman, have been part of a study being conducted at Brown University that transmits neural activity into physical movement via a robotic arm.

Cathy Hutchinson, the female volunteer, has been working with the implanted sensor for almost five years now to achieve this seemingly simple task.

Watch the video not just for the load of information it provides but for the kinda heart-warming moment when she actually drinks the coffee without assistance for the first time in fifteen years and both her and the up-until-then stone-faced science guy in the background triumphantly smile at their success…which is EXACTLY how our future robot overlords want us to feel.

Let’s just hope that the male volunteer’s name isn’t Otto Gunther Octavius…because that’s when all this feel-good/man-machine love story will just get ugly.

[YouTube]

The revolution is here. The machines have risen. And they can juggle.

Chiba University presented the following this week at 2012 IEE International Conference on Robotics and Automatiion.

The robot is equipped with a three-fingered hand, each with 2 or 3 degrees of motion, and an arm with 7 degrees of motion. These pieces are coupled with a high-speed vision system (500 frames per second) that allows a controller to plan for catches and throws, the IEEE Automation Blog explains.

Next they’ll spin plates…

[MSNBC]

Professor of Management Ian Yeoman and sexologist Michelle Mars have laid out their vision of the future in their paper “Robots, Men And Sex Tourism” published in the journal Futures. They predict that in the year 2050 $12,672 and a ticket to Amsterdam will net you some alone time with an android. They use a fictional club named Yub-yum to paint the picture:

Sexual tourists will pay about 10,000 Euro ($12,672) for an all-inclusive service from massages and lap dances to intercourse from the scantily-clad sexbots parading around.

In an increasingly youth and beauty-fixated society, Yub-yum would provide a range “of sexual gods and goddesses of different ethnicities, body shapes, ages, languages and sexual features”.

…

Clients could feel guilt free as they actually have not had sex with a real person and would not have to lie to their partner.

The androids would be made of bacteria resistant fibre and would be flushed for human fluids, therefore guaranteeing no STIs are transferred between consumers.

The rise of sex bots doesn’t just benefit their johns:

“Amsterdam’s tourist industry is built on an image of sex and drugs. The council was worried that if the red light district were to close, it would have a detrimental effect on the city’s brand and tourism industry.”

[Sydney Morning Herald]

Surgery robot Da Vinci shows off exactly how precise it is by peeling a grape. Like a show off.

[Da Vinci Surgery]

Spoiler Alert: Yeah they don’t really seem to like it that much. They like it even less when the robot warns them it is about to touch them ahead of time.

[Geekologie]

Auto Ink is a three axis numerically controlled sculpture. Once the main switch is triggered, the operator is assigned a religion and its corresponding symbol is tattooed onto the person’s arm. The operator does not have control over the assigned symbol. It is assigned either randomly or through divine intervention, depending on your personal beliefs.

[Make via Geekologie]

While robots continue to take jobs from hard working humans, they still show a surprising lack of judgement in choosing which jobs to steal.  Sign Dancer Pro is an outfit specializing in mechanical advertising, replacing those colorful human billboards on the side of the road.  I, for one, am going to miss the dancing Mario Brother on the corner.

[Singularity Hub]

You know, if we have a machine that can destroy legendary trivia heads at Jeopardy it’s high time we had a piece of software that could spot some creep trying to pull out their 4 Wood on sites like Chatroulette. But how?

A new research paper out of Cornell explains the symphony of algorithms behind identifying some random Johnson while adjusting for varying light, skin tone and image composition. For example, in a video demonstrating the program a picture of a couple lying together topless on a screen without exposing any naughty bits did not trigger as low of a rating a weirdo lifting their shirt to grip their tallywhacker for the cam. It also recognized low light and static images.

Pretty amazing stuff and a clever solution to a har… err… difficult problem.

[SafeVchat: Detecting Obscene Content and Misbehaving Users in Online Video Chat Services]

via [Improbable Research]

Northwestern University scientists have have created a robotic fish (GhostBot) that mimics the swimming motions of the black ghost knifefish found in the Amazon. Ghostbot can move from swimming forward and backward to swimming vertically almost instantaneously by using a sophisticated, ribbon-like fin.

[Physorg.com]

Sure, let’s invent a robot that utilizes the sophisticated technology necessary to artfully carve up a soft meat like a ham. Great idea.

When the streets are littered with the cleanly picked skeletons of the resistance, let me know how much you enjoyed your dinner.

[Geekologie]