Maybe, just maybe, we spoil our pets a bit too much.

Oh, sure, we don’t think twice about the occasional chew bone or some such, but some dogs today eat better than some people do.  Plus there’s the add-ons–clothing lines for pets, Xbox Live subscriptions (when do they PLAY??), dog houses made of crystal, even health insurance for pets!  It’s crazy!  And it only gets weirder when I start talking about the electronic dog door.

Dubbed the Plexidor Pet Door, it’s an electronic dog door with a vertical sliding door that slides up when your pet, who’s wearing an RFID chip in his or her collar, gets sufficiently close to it.

It’s a great measure for folks concerned about burglars using the pet door as a means of entry (a la Home Alone), but still wanting your pet to have the maximum amount of freedom.  They cost a whopping eight hundred bucks a pop, and that’s before you add on the cost of professional installment.  This thing has to be HARDWIRED into your house’s electrical system.

Still, it’s terribly awesome, and if you like even having the latest gadgets for your dog, then this one should be on your list.

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It might shock you to know there’s a Cyberdyne corporation in Japan.

But what only might shock you is to discover that they’re into robotics…but the helpful kind.  For instance, they’re working on a robotic suit that functions almost like an exoskeleton, augmenting weak limbs with outside mechanical help.  The really interesting part?  Since Japan’s population is getting older at a greater rate than the United States’, what I’m describing here could well become a “shape of things to come” sort of article for baby boomers right here.

The Japanese company is actually putting together other robots, too–not just walkers. How about a robot pet called the Paro?  It looks like a seal but is covered in fur, designed to offer the same benefits of a pet but without the difficulty and expense.  Holding and petting it causes sensors to form a “reaction”, while audio sensors allow it to “respond” to its name and neglecting it causes it to cry out, thus simulating a live pet.

One of the lead developers described it thusly:

“You forget it’s a robot. Some people think it’s almost a baby, and that’s a good thing, as it elicits a few little memories” from residents’ younger days.”

There are even more that are currently in development–robot housekeepers and walking PCs that surf the web at your voice command–so the future looks like it’s full of robots…at least for the Japanese.

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Now this is actually a really fun idea–you know how, when you were a kid, you probably used to imagine various household objects as race cars?  Well, now you can do it for real with the RC Driver Tissue Box.

This isn’t just a fun idea, either.  It’s also highly useful.  I remember when I had the flu…I was on my back, barely able to move, and even something like getting up to go get a tissue to try and clear my nose sufficiently to breathe was like the labors of Sisyphus.  But the thought of being able to snag a remote and DRIVE my tissues to my sick bed makes me feel almost…happy, somehow.

But still, the idea of driving your tissues around the house is probably at least a minor freakout, so be careful.  It’d be terrible trying to, say, explain to the vet that you ran over your cat’s foot with a box of tissues.  They’re taking pre-orders on them now for $44, so get them before someone else does!

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It’s always pretty interesting to see other things besides the Wii get controlled via Wiimote.  Some have hooked it to Airsoft guns or what have you, but today I’ve dug up a little something interesting.

Thanks to the Casmobot lawn mower, developed by scientists at the University of Southern Denmark, you can now use your Wiimote to tackle lawn chores.

The mower is synced to the Wiimote with Bluetooth, and allows you to not only steer the device, but also engage the cutting action (just tilt the Wiimote forward) or set the device on autopilot where it makes passes inside a previously established zone.

The grass cutting equivalent of a Roomba is a sweet enough idea, but tying it to your Wiimote?  Now that’s just entertaining!  Plus, for all the kids in the audience, next time mom and dad get all bent out of shape about your gaming time, just tell them you’re getting in practice for lawn mowing season.

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So originally I was going to write about India’s newfound fascination with the road spike, but then I thought better of it and discovered that Boston Dynamics was actually well on its way to making Terminators.

Aren’t you glad I didn’t go with the road spike story?

Anyway, Boston Dynamics has developed a class of robot, the Petman, that “closely mirrors human physiology”.  It’s currently being used to test chemical warfare suits, and therefore controls movement, humidity, and even a kind of sweating to get the closest possible approximation of how the gear will work with humans.  Here’s word direct from Boston Dynamics:

“Natural, agile movement is essential for PETMAN to simulate how a soldier stresses protective clothing under realistic conditions. The robot will have the shape and size of a standard human, making it the first anthropomorphic robot that moves dynamically like a real person.”

I don’t know whether to be impressed or horrified, so I’m going with both.  It MOVES…like a real PERSON.  I’m always a little squeamish when people talk about robots that look, act, or behave like people.  Too much bad science fiction growing up, I suppose, but it always seems like robot assassins are never too far behind that development.

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If you’ve seen a Wallace and Gromit cartoon lately, chances are you’re familiar with at least something vaguely like what I’m about to point out today–the Breakfast Machine.

Breakfast Machines aren’t exactly new.  There was one in the old Pee Wee Herman movies.  Doc Brown had one in Back to the Future, even if it didn’t work right.  But now, thanks to two design artists at the Royal College of Art, there is now a real live Breakfast Machine.

The Breakfast Machine cooks omelettes, toast with butter and / or jam, coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice all within the confines of its own framework.  Even better, the Royal College of Art folks claim that this project can actually be replicated, at home, for less than two thousand dollars.

The device is currently disassembled, but its creators are hoping to take it on a world tour for exhibition and then bring it to London.

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Admittedly, the Amio is a pretty awesome robot, but it takes the Japanese to make something truly creepy with their robot and blow the Amio clean out of the water.

The Japanese, you see, built a fully functional robot…that simulates SWINE FLU.

Unveiled at the recent gathering of the Security and Safety Trade Expo in Tokyo, the Swine Flu Robot simulates fully a patient experiencing swine flu. Everything.  That includes sweating, moaning, and convulsing.  Plus, if the symptoms aren’t properly treated, they start to diminish until eventually the robot stops “breathing”.

For a society that gave us games about doctors, this isn’t terribly surprising.  Perhaps one of the greatest illness simulators ever devised, this robot is bound to help someone with their swine flu training.

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The robot revolution continues on unabated with the emergence of the Amio robot, a walking, bipedal robot that actually approaches human-looking.

It stands about five feet tall, weighs about ninety pounds and has a top walking speed of somewhere in the neighborhood of half a mile per hour.  He’s got a pair of CCD cameras to give it a hand in navigation, and it even comes with built-in speech and voice recognition software, so hopefully, if you tell it to go fetch you a drink, a drink is fetched.

The thought of a fully functioning robot butler that understands your voice commands is frankly cheery, and though there’s no word on when it’ll be available or for how much, if it even is released to the public.  That and they’ll have to do something about the horrible speed.

Though there’s another possibility with this one–it may not be intended for fetch-and-carry chores, but rather as a way to get a better understanding of how humans and robots interact.  It understands and can respond to speech and voices, so that may be why this one’s around.

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Remember when I was freaking out over the concept of cyborg combat wasps?

Well, I’ve got something even more frightening here–apparently, the crew out at Harvard are neck deep in developing an entire colony of robot bees.

No biological material involved here, folks, just an entirely artificial, entirely mechanical robot bee.  The National Science Foundation handed over a whopping ten million dollars for Harvard to start building the ersatz honeymakers.  The bees will have realistic and flight-capable flapping wings, optical flow sensors to avoid collisions and for navigation, plus “pollination and docking appendages” as well as an as-yet-unknown power source.

Considering that honeybees have been going missing for most of the last couple years, a backup source of honeybees might not be a terrible idea.  But I find it vaguely horrifying all the same that we’re attempting to replicate nature with hardware.  Something just…wrong…about that.

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Oh yes.  I’m going to a haunted corn maze on Friday or a maize maze for those of you who like multi-lingual wordplay, and if this remote controlled bat was part of the show I’d be impressed.

Exactly what you think it is, this 13 gram and 10 inches of wingspan Flying Vampire Bat uses a tiny lithium polymer battery that lasts for 10 minutes for every half hour of charging.   This has Halloween prank written all over it.

The controller runs off of 6 whole AA batteries and the whole product costs around $33.  To add to the scare tactics the bat also has green LED’s embedded in the eyes for all those unsuspecting Trick-or-Treaters.

This reminds me of something I saw in Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive and I’m sure it will do its best to “kick ass for the lord!”

[via CoolestGadgets]

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This may well be the king of all office supplies.  No, it’s not one of those sweet executive ball-clacker deals (even though they are sweet).  Nor is it a dartboard or a Blackberry or anything like that.  No, the unquestioned king of all office supplies has to be Snackbot.

Snackbot is a big talking yellow and white robot that delivers snacks directly to your desk on command.  There’s a downside, though…there’s only ONE SNACKBOT, and he’s currently being held at Carnegie Mellon University, where it’s basically under construction as a way to find how an autonomous robot can operate within the busy, highly complex operations of a modern office.  Apparently there’s a lot of programming involved for a robot that can successfully make snack runs throughout a typical office building.

Hopefully, one day, Snackbots will be as ubiquitous as the coffee maker in most offices, but until then, you know Carnegie Mellon will be getting loads of snacks out of this.

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Well, that’s it for me, folks–my science fiction lobe has officially collapsed on me, because I was just reading about a new military project that’ll probably change the way war is fought forever.

I read about cyborg beetles.

It seems that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA, the guys who started the Internet in the first place) have been working on a kind of “cyborg beetle” that’s been surgically altered and given all sorts of awesome mechanical doodads to engage in fighting and surveillance of the enemy.  They can be controlled remotely by humans in the field, and are actually part of a much larger overall project called HI-MEMS, the Hybrid Insect Micro-Electric Mechanical Systems.  HI-MEMS, if I understood correctly, will yield history’s first-ever truly bionic organism.

The article went on from there about what all they could do, but my head started swimming about the time I pictured wasps jammed full of uranium so they gave poisoned radioactive stings to their targets.

They’re the perfect soldier.  Absolutely expendable.  Kill as many as you please, the colony will hatch a few million more.  Heaven help us when they start carrying explosives.

They’re the perfect assassin.  Can you lock yourself down so effectively that even a spider can’t reach you?  And a cybernetic black widow could definitely take out a target, probably without ever being noticed.

I don’t know whether to be amazed or horrified, and right now, I’m trending toward horrified.

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Cyborg babies.

Okay, so I’m overreacting.  But researchers at the University of Delaware have designed the UD1, a robot that will allow disabled babies to navigate their environment.  These robots are actually like a power chair that can be operated by a joystick.  You may not have thought that babies could operate joysticks, and you wouldn’t be alone.  In fact, it was commonly thought that a baby couldn’t operate a joystick until age three, but as it turns out, even a six month old baby can figure out how a joystick can make a toy that is far away move closer.

There have been concerns about babies outgrowing the power chair, and thus making them prohibitively expensive for any family to get for their disabled infant, but U of D researchers are also looking at “kits” for retrofitting the device to get them to better fit the babies.  They also want to drop the overall size of the chair to make it more mobile inside buildings.

It’s a pretty awesome concept, no matter how you slice it, and Baby Terminator just might make a good movie.  I wonder if Sam Worthington would come back….

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If you’re not whistling the Spectacular Spider-Man theme song yet, you likely will be after I finish filling you in on the new Spiderbot.

The Spiderbot, you see, is a spider like robot (as you no doubt surmised from the name itself), with one interesting difference.  It shoots webs.  Yes, it shoots out webbing of sufficient strength to support its own weight.  Also, the Spiderbot is capable of sticking to walls.  It is, essentially, a gigantic robot spider.

Now, I don’t know if this is just some new toy–the fact that it would be an awesome toy notwithstanding–or the precursor to some kind of new and awesome device, but if it gets me to the point where I can swing on webs to get around instead of taking the car, you can sign me up to be an early adopter.  The Spiderbot itself is indeed awesome, but what the Spiderbot could be is even more so.

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And then I realize I don’t TAKE medication, and further realize that I’m watching Fox News, so that explains everything.

Anyway, as it turns out, they’re kind of right for once–the Pentagon is actively engaged in developing  a kind of “scavenger robot” that can power itself by obtaining biomass from the environment.  Biomass, in case you’re not familiar, can be stuff like field gleanings, grass clippings, rotten fruit, other garbage…and yes, it can also be human corpses.

The Pentagon’s contractor in this little vision–and if you said “Cyberdyne”, NO, but it’s still funny-Robotic Technology Inc., had this to say about its Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot–or EATR–robot:

“…an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling.”

Well, I’m officially creeped out.  How about you?

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How do you promote your robot factory?  Simple, you open a noodle shop.  That’s what Japanese resident and entrepreneur Mr Nagoya did and now his robots server over 80 bowels of soup a day.

The robots can produce one bowel every 40 seconds and when the shop is slow the robots entertain customer by pretending to battle one in another in a sort of sword and shield battle.

Each bow of soup costs $7, so while popular the store is far from profitable due to the costs incurred due to research and development of the robot arms.

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Shock and awe hardly begin to describe my reaction to this video of Toyota’s humanoid robot running a 7kmh.  Sure, that’s only a few points short of 4mph, but given its life like ability to move and to sustain balance after a slight push, I’d say all in all it’s pretty impressive.

Now, don’t confuse this with Honda’s ASIMO robot, which apparently can run at 6kmh.  Toyota’s version, which seems to be nameless, stands 130cm tall and weighs 50kg. It’s running ability is limited to flat surfaces and a sudden push would probably knock it flat on its ass.

[via Make]

Read
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Believe it or not, the Humanoid Robot with iPhone head performs functions and commands using the handset.  It can be set to dance to music, dance when the alarm goes off or be taught new moves using what I assume is some sort of custom app.  To provide the robot with a bit more pizazz they’ve also included a set of facial experession screens giving it a more human like facade.  Video below.

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Like a dog following its master, the Shadow Caddy effortlessly carries all your golf gear from hole to hole without any instruction or remote control.  It tracks you via a transmitter adorned to your belt and includes an object sensor to avoid running into people and objects.  To stop the Shadow Caddy you just simply flick the ‘park me’ switch and alternatively hit the ‘follow me’ switch to move to your next hole.  The Shadow Caddy has actually been around for sometime now and is available for rental only on select golf courses throughout the world.

[via Gearfuse]

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Remember the ‘Chariot‘?  Well, it’s back and this time we’ve got it in video.  I must say I’m impressed with how easy it looks to operate, but I still ask the question of what happens when you hit a flight of stairs or let alone one step?  Video below.

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