More swarmbots

Check out this cool and rather funny demonstration of a modular robot reassembling itself upon being kicked by an evil human.

A BBC News crew went to Germany to try ’s Baggers, the robotized, fully automated restaurant in which there’s not a single waiter in sight and plates float over your head on steel rails to reach your seat, Futurama-style. And apparently, they loved it.

Fully Automated Robo-Restaurant Tested (Verdict: Delicious, Fun, No Bloody Tips)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Astronauts bound for orbit this week will dabble in science fiction, assembling a “monstrous” two-armed space station robot that will rise like Frankenstein from its transport bed.
Putting together Dextre, the robot, will be one of the main jobs for the seven Endeavour astronauts, who are scheduled to blast off [...]

EMMELOORD, Netherlands (Reuters) - Motorists nostalgic for the time they could sit tight while attendants braved windswept garage forecourts to fill their tanks may yet see those heady days return — compliments of a Dutch robot.
Dutch inventors unveiled on Monday a 75,000 euro ($111,100) car-fuelling robot they say is the first of its kind, working [...]

“The way water striders walk on water was discovered years ago. The insect uses its long legs to help evenly distribute its tiny body weight. The weight is distributed over a large area so that the fragile skin formed by surface tension supports the bug on the water. However, the ability of water striders to [...]

“There is a quite an interesting human size robot that comes from UAE, REEM-A. It has some interesting skills as dynamic walking (of course), object recognition, voice recognition, self localization and mapping, long battery life and face recognition. Recently, the development team announced that the second prototype, REEM-B, will be presented in February 2008. The [...]

Pretty cool Gundam Mech dude.

GUNDAM CRISIS attraction opens up, fanboys unite - Engadget

Tags: attraction + crisis + fun + gundam + japan + mech + Robotics

Say hello to RoboCup’s tiny competitors, the NanoCup!
“A total of five teams from North America and Switzerland built microscopic competitors that were around “six times smaller than an amoeba and weighed no more than a few hundred nanograms.” The wee devices showed their stuff in the oh-so-fascinating Nano Cup soccer match, which had to be [...]