Robot Overlord Scenario #6378

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Leave it to the Japanese to think of the perfect cat. the problem is, cats are fun because of the mostly weird things they do, not entirely from the old purr and pet. Still, at least there’s no litter to clean with this one.

iRobot teams up with TASER manufacturer to make a non-lethal (for most) taser robot. The name of the new company will be Cyberdyne Systems. Going from house cleaning to war robots in one fell swoop!

I, for one, salute our new robot overlords.

This viral video has been sweeping over the net and coming at me from every direction. I usually don’t repost ones that are so widespread, but, since drzy has taken a turn towards robots lately, I feel I must.

So, I give you Nazi, American, and even Japanese mechs in an alternate past… a short CG film by the folks at cee-gee.net.

Here’s a robot done by some GarageGeeks guys that physically plays Guitar Hero. They call it Guitar Heronoid. With the help of some optical color sensors, a programmed “brain”, and some, uh, “extra” appendages (one hand with an extra finger for that elusive orange guitar button) it powers through the songs like a pron00b.

But this is a good thing, because moments after they conquer our video games, the robot armies will be setting us up for Matrix battery-mode.

South Korea is actually holding a conference whose purpose is to develop laws to ensure that humans do not abuse robots, and vice-versa. They are calling it the Robot Ethics Charter.

I think it’s a little odd, since there are no self-aware or sentient robots, yet. But it’s very novel that a government is choosing to make official laws governing things like robot ethics. Even though the Asimov robot laws were mainly intended for the robot itself, the South Korean laws seem mainly for the human facet.

“Imagine if some people treat androids as if the machines were their wives,” Park Hye-Young of the ministry’s robot team told the AFP news agency.

“Others may get addicted to interacting with them just as many internet users get hooked to the cyberworld.”

Maybe they were frightened by the upsurge in sexy robots, or possibly the emergence of robots that think humans taste like bacon.

Even more likely: they watch too much Battlestar Galactica.

Japanese researchers at NEC System Technologies and Mie University have made a robot that is designed to analyze wine.

At the end of the robot’s left arm is an infrared spectrometer. When objects are placed up against the sensor, the robot fires off a beam of infrared light. The reflected light is then analyzed in real time to determine the object’s chemical composition.

The key quote that prompted the title…

When a reporter’s hand was placed against the robot’s taste sensor, it was identified as prosciutto. A cameraman was mistaken for bacon.

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This Korean corporation, Robo3, seems to have the capital to make robots purely for enjoyment. They have a ridable robot, complete with dinosaur and dog models, full dinosaur robots, serving robots, puppet-show robots, and human-like female robot.

I fully approve.

Some University of Michigan students built a robot that physically solves a Rubik’s Cube as a class project. In the video below it solves a particular cube pattern in 54 seconds.

At IREX 2005, an electronics show in Japan, they demonstrated this robot Pacman game. A physical Pacman board with a robot Pacman controlled by remote control. The ghosts are just decoration on this model, but all of them light up, and the Pacman really picks up the “pills”. How cool would it be if the ghosts really chased him and turned blue when he picked up the power pills?

The project is actually Namco and Bandai sponsored, so I’m not sure if it’s a game that will be released, or just a fun demo to promote some other product.

Here’s a video of it in action.

Links and video from Akihabara News.

The race is on to keep humans one step ahead of robots: an international team of scientists and academics is to publish a code of ethics for machines as they become more and more sophisticated. “Dilemmas may arrive sooner than we think”, says Henrik Christensen. “People are going to be having sex with robots within five years.”

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