Robot Roundup

I’m not sure if it’s because I’m a paranoid recluse paying for a shockingly drug and booze-addled youth, or that I’ve watched too much TV… but there’s something about robots these days which is filling me with an increasing sense of foreboding.

So here are a load more.

1) Gob Stopper

Which Boing Boing found via Robert Popper – which is a Good Thing, on account of Robert Popper being a genius.

And I know what you’re thinking: “OMG, I wonder if I could use it as some sort of sex toy?”.

In your dreams buddy, in your dreams… In your hellishly fucked up, freudian nightmares, filled with all manner of wackoid, tangential weird-shittery… which for some reason, you seem to actually enjoy.

2) Safari Cam Thing

AKA Beetle-cam. Like a little Wall-E type robot that roams the savanna, befriending the wild animals that EAT IT.

“After obtaining our first photographs of Elephants we were buoyed with optimism and decided to make our second subjects Lions. In hindsight this was a foolish idea; BeetleCam was promptly mauled, and carried off into the bush.”

I’m not sure why I find that funny, but I do.

There are other photies and vids here.

I’m quite keen on this as nano-scale idea though. Tiny Robot Safaris fighting spiders in your back yard etc. You’re never going to win. Not without firearms.

3) Big list of hexapods over here.

I think the one that unnerved me the most here was this wall-climbing one.

More of an “oh shit, what have we done” thing than the usual arachnophobia though. No good will come of this, mark my words. It’s a weapon. It’s a spying machine. That’s all it can do.

4) New Video from the Festo-Plex

For all your fruit-sorting needs. Festo produce loads of cool things – and they always seem to be beautifully designed as well… the sort of things that “the goodies” would be using… if you know what I mean.

Goodies fly planes that look like this:

rather than this:

I don’t know what happened to modern military design. Don’t these people watch movies?

It used to be all about “Our Boys”, flying spitfires or silver Mustangs – beautiful creatures that a population can get behind and support. Now they don’t care. It’s all about frightening people… they’ve dehumanised themselves.

5) Arduino Controlled Delta-bot

I’m of the opinion that this is what Repraps need to be based on – rather than the cartesian thing. Something self-calibrating… so the precision comes from self-checking 1000 times a second. Something that can choose its own tools etc.

6) R2 Going into Space

Although I do wonder if humanoid is the best design really. I mean we’ve evolved to fit a set of environmental conditions – a lot of which are social, so various characteristics are selected for sexually etc… and this set of conditions is almost certain pre-tool. Once we started making tools, we didn’t really need to adapt physically any more.

So to take an animal which is adapted to a simple hunter-gatherer existence, with certain conditions like availability of oxygen, food, water etc – and then transplant that into a heavily mechanised environment, in space… seems to me like an exercise in fulfilling some sort of misguided aesthetic longing. Again, it’s invention imitating sci-fi.

Ok – that’s probably enough for now.