Robo-fish would be the coolest bath toy ever

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To the casual eye, this may be a fish caught somewhere off the uncanny valley, but most fishes’ limited eyesight will mean that it slips by completely unnoticed as it goes about its business. And its business is detecting hazardous pollutants in the water off the coast of Spain.

They’ve been designed by a group of UK scientists with the intention of not scaring the local water life. They look like carp, and move around realistically with a top speed of around 2.25mph. They cost £20,000 a-piece, but fortunately the designers from the University of Essex have found the European Commission happy to foot the bill.

Sexy dancing robot ladies look at you, in some clever artistic commentary on CCTV society

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If you want the thrill of seeing a woman dancing on a stage but without the risk of being seen entering the establishment or having to make eye contact with a live female, here’s a perfect futuristic solution.

This collection of moving, gyrating, female-like components can be seen in action at the Mutate Britain exhibition, where you can stare all you want without being made to feel sad or guilty because…

Creepy robotic head copies your facial expressions

This is a damn creepy robotic head, put together by researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. He’s called “Jules”, and can watch your facial expressions and copy them. In the video above, he’s copying the expressions of the scientist behind the camera, while you hear the scientists’ voice.

Dunno about you, but this one, for me, falls firmly into the uncanny valley. Especially if it was copying my facial movements exactly. It’s a bit like that friend everyone has who doesn’t quite ‘get’ social interaction and always behaves a little bit odd. Robotics is great, but we’re still some way off realistic human expressions, it seems.

(via the Daily Mail)

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Pownce beer robot makes arms slightly more redundant

The great thing about being a geek is that you can do stuff without the nagging question “Why?”. To a geek, the questions “Why have you made the toaster run a web server?”, “Why have you built a teddy that speaks Twitter?” and “Why am I not surprised you’re single?” don’t ever factor into any decision making. Which is why someone has made a beer pouring robot that’s powered by Twitter-alike microblogging service Pownce.

Artist unveils vision of distopian future where robots have attitude instead of manners

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The trouble with scientists is that they’re too obsessed with numbers and efficiency and functionality – its why all of the robots that have been invented so far don’t quite live up to what we’ve come to expect from science fiction. Sure, those robot arms that build cars are probably quite useful, but they don’t really look the part. That’s why you need artists. Artists like Nemo Gould…

Touchy-feely Robot-Skin for Robots (and maybe us)

Everyone loves a robot. Especially a sensitive robot. Just look at WALL-E or Johnny-5. When it comes to a robot who has the capacity to feel, we all go a bit gooey inside. The cold, unfeeling, emotionless robot is a metaphor for that fear we have of losing what it is to be human.

Okay, so i'm playing loose with the double-meanings behind the word 'feel' and 'sensitive', because we're not talking emotional robots, or robots with 'feelings' but rather robots which can feel. Like in objects, and surroundings. LIke we can, physically.

Yes, some rather smug looking Japanese researchers/scientists/tech-bods have stumbled upon the perfect answer to the problem of making Robots completely sensitive to their environment. Be it cold, hot, hard, or soft. The skin they've developed looks like tin foil, gold tin foil like the stuff they wrap around marathon runners at the end of the race. Space Blankets i think they're called. Anyway, it looks like that, but it's not. It's a fine rubbery material that has hundreds and thousands of tiny carbon particles inside which allow conductivity of electricity. The skin can be stretched to 2.3 times it's normal size, allowing it to bend around a robot's metal frame and move with joints like a glove.

Robots become self-aware, but think that they're rats, so we're okay for now

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Scientists at the University of Reading have got a step closer to creating Cybermen – human brains inside a robot – after putting together a small robot that uses rat neurones to control itself.

The scientists have managed to grow around 300,000 rat neurones artificially in the lab by starting off with the brain of a rat faetus. These neurones have gone on to make connections with each other and work in much the same way a regular rat brain does, using electrical impulses to make the brain “do stuff”. The neurons are connected to a regular microchip, where they can be stimulated and the results analysed to see what happens. For example, they’ve built a robot on wheels with an ultrasound sensor, to spot when it is approaching a wall. I guess it’s like giving a rat the Bat-power of echo-location. Maybe.

Robopong – for the lonely table tennis enthusiast

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Do you ever find yourself staring forlornly at the Ping Pong table in your garage at 3am? Wanting to bat a table tennis ball about, but feeling that it might be a bit antisocial to wake up your neighbor for a quick knockabout? It’s your lucky day. Robopong is a robot that’ll fire up to 200 table tennis balls at you. It’s heavily configurable – you can adjust the angle, speed and frequency of the barrage, and it comes with a remote control that lets you adjust these variables from the comfort of your side of the table…