“Why is there a serious lack of humanoid research… in the US?” Mark Miller asks. Not content simply to complain, Miller’s doing something about it. His workshop is full of androids in varying stages of function, but his active baby is “Amy”, a four-foot tall bot that he develops on a mostly daily basis. He logs his development experiences whether positive or negative, and is self-taught. “I am not attempting to replace people in the workforce, or take away jobs,” Miller says, “but to add quality to their lives by allowing some of the everyday tasks to be done by a machine. We have very short life spans, and should have as much time as possible doing what we want to do.” [GT]

The android man (via Gadget Lab)

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Today the NASA-funded Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer (DEPTHX) is at the bottom of the Zacaton geothermal sinkhole in Tamaulipas, Mexico. Tomorrow it could be searching for water at the bottom of the icy crust on Europa, the moon of Jupiter. The DEPTHX has 100 sensors, 36 computers and 16 thrusters with which it can navigate and map for up to eight hours without human intervention. Plus, it looks like the kind of thing an alien species might be astounded to find in its watery backyard. [GT]

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The robotic lawnmower concept is terrific in all directions — they’re electric, so they don’t generate ghastly diesel emissions, they tend to mow daily and mulch the clippings so the lawn is healthier and there’s no clumps of grass to dispose of, and they spare your precious time. However, they do still involve heavy duty spinning blades and require caution, as demonstrated in Denmark recently when a municipal worker was killed by a robotic lawnmower. The mower became unbalanced, tipped over, and fell onto the worker, killing him instantly with a blade to the head. Video of the mower itself, the Spider ILD 01, after the jump. [GT]

Robot lawnmower kills Danish man (via Engadget)

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Kansei, from Meji University in Japan, is a robot face capable of 36 expressions that vary according to emotional interpretations of words it hears. When Kansei hears a word, it uses software to access a database of 500,000 keywords, create word associations and determine an emotion — ranging from happiness to sadness, anger and fear — which is expressed by a system of 19 actuators under its silicone skin. Sometimes the reaction is extremely expressive, as here with the word “bomb”, sometimes very subtle. (The question arises, would it have the same expression if it was given the sentence “The party was the bomb”?) Video after the jump shows its interesting reaction to the word “president”.

(via Pink Tentacle)

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