Hitachi unveils your future desk mate

EMIEW-2-office-robot.jpgMeet EMIEW 2. EMIEW stands for Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Workmate, which is a nightmare for the poor thing to type in every morning when it logs onto the network, so EMIEW 2 it is.

EMIEW is an office worker robot, which was recently demonstrated at Hitachi’s Research Lab. It has the ability to (brace yourself) guide visitors…

Opinion: Why are robots still so rubbish!

Jon_small_new.jpgSo there I was on Friday, snowed under with work and wanting the weekend to arrive but take a bit longer than usual to get here so I could finish off everything I needed to do. And then it struck me, what I actually needed was some help around the house. No, I don’t mean an eastern European cleaner, or a girlfriend – the first is too expensive and the second a lot of hassle, or should that be the other way around?

And then I read on Tech Digest about the iRobot Looj: the robot that cleans your gutter. Now that’s more like it! A robot for cleaning my gutter, I WANT ONE! The fact my gutting doesn’t need cleaning and is currently free of leaves, is of no consequence…

Robosapien gets a Sesame Street makeover to become ElmoSapien

elmosapien-robot.jpgCor. Someone’s taken the Robosapien robot and merged it with an Elmo hand puppet to produce ElmoSapien, complete with over 200 custom sound effects to make the bot sound just like the real Elmo.

Well, the fictional puppet Elmo, obviously, but you know what I mean. Full instructions on how to make ElmoSapien are provided on the RobotsRule website, and it seems fairly easy. Better still, it’s effectively a suit for your Robosapien, so doesn’t mess the bot up if you want to transform him back in the future.