Robots

Troy Hurtubise has certainly auctioned off a few grizzly fighting suits before (not to mention the Halo-inspired Trojan), but this is likely your one and only shot at procuring the original Project Grizzly Mk VI suit worn by Troy himself in the generally unknown cult classic Project Grizzly. The suit is being offered to the highest bidder as the Grizzly Proof exhibit in Toronto shuts down, and while the starting bid sits at $500, it’ll take upwards of 40 grand before Mr. Hurtubise’s debts associated with the suit are cleared. C’mon, you know that’s all the reason you need to throw your hat into the ring.

[Thanks, Cantraider]

Look, this top ten celebrity child-rearing tips list of ours is gonna make it to the top, we just know it, and we’re tired of hitting up family members to get stories out of the single digits. Luckily there’s a better way. The robotic Digg arm — which appears to be slightly or entirely fake — refreshes a page, detects Digg badges on the screen, and then moves the cursor over them to “manually” Digg the stories. Apparently the bot can Digg 1500 stories a day, but we’re gonna need some more evidence than this joke vid (embedded after the break) to be convinced of this bot’s actual, welcomed existence.

[Via Make]

When Brian Hart’s 20 year old son was killed in Iraq in 2003, the grief-stricken parent turned his anguish to engineering, founding Black-I Robotics to build unmanned ground vehicles for recon, explosives and hazard work, and most of the other stuff you see land-bots doing in dangerous situations. Of course, what makes Hart’s story so powerful is also what gives it a certain irony — after taking the government to task for leading the nation’s under-equipped military into unnecessarily dangerous situations, he began taking on work as a defense contractor to develop a cheaper, more robust machine in the hopes of getting more soldiers out of harm’s way. Last week Black-I secured another $800,000 contract from the gov’s Technical Support Working Group, and has also been field-trialing their latest version of the Land Shark UGV for the past few months.

[Via Physorg]

Not that it’s any surprise, but according to a patent filing (which we were unable to ourselves unearth from the abyss that is the USPTO), iRobot would appear to still be working on the “Mowba,” or whatever the hell the lawn-cutting robot is that they were talking up years ago. We’re not sure you really need to pore over 80 pages of sketches and drawings to get the idea though, especially since there are already a number of autonomous grass-cutting machines out there.

We’ve seen plenty of robots that are capable of showing their appreciation for music, but few have as refined a taste as this trio of bots designed by a team of UK artists and scientists, which have been trained to like punk music and nothing else. That was apparently done by employing “adaptive resonance theory,” which allows the robots to build up a history of patterns relating to different sounds, and analyze songs on the fly, matching the patterns against other types of music it has already listened to. As you can see in the BBC’s video available at the read link below, the bot’s were apparently easily able to recognize a band that they hadn’t heard before and, if you hurry, you can actually check ‘em out first hand, as they’ll be doing their thing at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts until July 5th.

Using polymorph plastic, some curtain rods, electric screwdrivers, motors, and a whole lot of mad-scientist creativity, an Xrobots hobbyist created this organic-looking robot base. By using wooden sockets and curtain rings as hip joints, the designer is clearly going for a human-like creature of doom here. Knee joints are kept moving with four motors each while a network of bungee cords and strings will act as muscles and tendons. Meanwhile, electric screwdrivers provide power for rotation. The legs measure 26-inches tall alone, so it looks like he’s on his way to a real beast here. Hit the read link to see all the raw materials and sit in awe at this monster in the making.

[Via Hacked Gadgets]

Building a big robot is nothing to congratulate yourself on, but doing it in this manner is certainly worthy of a little self-indulgence. The creature you see standing before you is a 22-foot tall Styrobot constructed entirely from spare polystyrene packing materials, and no, each piece didn’t just show up that way. Michael Salter managed to whittle away on this beast until its completion, and now we’re hearing that it’ll be going on a short demonstration tour before being “decommissioned.” We say throw a brain in there and see what happens when you cut it loose.

[Via TechDigest]

Korean artist, Choe U Ram, possesses something most artists don’t: a deep understanding of robotics. With it, he creates massive, precision engineered sculptures with an eerie organic feel. While his show titled, Anima Machines (Anima is Latin for life or soul) just wrapped up at the SCAI The Bathhouse gallery in Japan, we’ve managed to collect a few images and video of the exhibition as disturbingly beautiful and tragic as the uprising itself.

[Via Impress]

Robots teaching robots? Check. Robots teaching humans? Check. Robots learning things on their own accord? Um, terrifying? All kidding aside, the UMass Mobile Manipulator is one smart cookie. Put simply, this intelligent robot pushes objects around in order to identify how they move, and once that’s accomplish, it begins “manipulating them to perform tasks.” If this sounds awfully similar to something your infant does, that’s because the two are indeed very much related. UMan, as it’s so eloquently dubbed, packs its own wheels, battery pack, one-meter arm, three-fingered hand and webcam in order to interact with the world, and sure enough, one researcher even mentioned the potential of it learning to operate a pair of scissors. Great, what’s next — a BFG?

[Via CrunchGear]