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 in the wee hours of Tuesday, less than three weeks after the last shuttle flight.

They’re also delivering the first piece of Japan’s massive Kibo space station lab, a float-in closet for storing tools, experiments and spare parts. For the first time, each of the five major international space station partners will own a piece of the real estate.

• Wired News: Astronauts Will Assemble Robot in Space

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 by registering the car on arrival at the filling station and matching it to a database of fuel cap designs and fuel types.

A robotic arm fitted with multiple sensors extends from a regular gas pump, carefully opens the car’s flap, unscrews the cap, picks up the fuel nozzle and directs it towards the tank opening, much as a human arm would, and as efficiently.

• Dutch unveil robot to fill car gas tank | Technology | Reuters

“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 jump onto water without sinking has baffled scientists, until now.”

• Slashdot | Robots That Bounce on Water

“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 second prototype has many improvements: a fingered hand with 12 motors, the ability to go up and down stairs, additional force sensors on the arms, ultrasonic range finders to avoid obstacles and a completely new look.”

• Slashdot | REEM-B, New Humanoid Robot Announced

“A new study from UCLA showed that monkeys, like humans, learn faster by being actively involved in the learning process rather than just having information placed before them, according to a story in ScienceDaily. In the study, two rhesus macaque monkeys learned to put up to 18 photos on an ATM-like touch screen in a row. ‘The monkeys did much better on the first three days when they had the help than when they didn’t, but on the test day, it completely reversed. When they studied with the hint, there is no evidence they learned anything about the list. They learned the lists when they didn’t get the help.’”

• Slashdot | Monkeys and Humans Learn the Same Way

Pretty cool Gundam Mech dude.

• GUNDAM CRISIS attraction opens up, fanboys unite – Engadget

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 projected onto a screen in order for anyone to actually take a look at the action.”

• Microscopic robots get their game on at RoboCup – Engadget

“The 2007 installment of RoboCup has begun; individual events opened to the public today. RoboCup is an international robotics symposium and competition whose goal is to advance the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence to the point that in 2050 a robot soccer team can defeat the human world champions. This year, RoboCup is located on the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta, GA, marking the first time a university is hosting it and only the second time since it began in 1993 that it is located in the United States.”

• Slashdot | RoboCup 2007 Opens At Georgia Tech