From My Cold Dead Hand!

Prof. Yosi Shacham-Diamand of Tel Aviv University's Department of Engineering, working with a team of EU scientists, has successfully wired an artificial hand to existing nerve endings in the stump of a severed arm. The device, called "SmartHand," resembles ― in function, sensitivity and appearance ― a real hand. They fell a little short on the appearance point, but otherwise this sounds like the culmination of years of work in this field.

Now that they've got the hand part down there's only 1999 parts left to go.

Source: Eurekalert - Applause for the SmartHand

Raytheon Sends Androids to the Battlefield

Forbes is running an article on the deployment of a Google Android device for battlefield use.

From the description it sounds like they've perverted the social networking features of the new smartphone OS and turned it into a kind of Google Latitude for war. Now, your buddy list can include all your attack drones! Yay!

Next up: Drones form a buddy clique and start using missles to poke their old friends on Facebook.

Sans Sapiens Robonihilationwire News

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Random Robot Roundup from Robots.Net Posted: 16 Sep 2009 02:50 PM PDT The inbox is still overflowing with robots news, so here's another random news dump, this time entirely from the backlog of the Swirling Brain. We've got a Science Daily story on the possibility of replicating the human brain in some form of machine within 10 years; an engadget story on plasmodium based veggie bots; a Killeen Daily Herald article on the recent Army Robotics Rodeo tests at Fort Hood in Texas; an AirForceTimes story on tube-launched UAVs; a TECH Universe article on parasitic energy stealing robots; an io9 blogon the impact of robots on our economic future; and an IEEE Spectrum articleon segmented self-steering airships; a TMCnet.com article on the rise of robotics gaming; a PCWorld story about a LEGO robot that solves Sudoku puzzles; and finally, a truly strange and interesting story about Rohan Jhunjhunwala, who is building robots for elephants at the Oregon Zoo including an apple launching robot to feed them and an elephant piano for the animals to play. Know any other robot news, gossip, or amazing facts we should report? Send 'em our way please. And don't forget to follow us on twitter.

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Robot Overlord 1.0

PopSci has interesting article on a prototype "Teamworkbot". The goal of this project is to develop bots that can "know how to read their partner's actions and intentions and to predict what he or she will do next as they complete tasks together." 

Seeing the video however, it seems painfully obvious that the robot just intends to train its human slave. The guy in the demo isn't improving the robot's opinion of the human race either.

Wired For War

Robonihilationwire News - Mechagodzilla to Incite Robot Uprising from Japan

MechaGodzilla Monster Robot Ready to Attack and Destroy Posted: 30 Oct 2008 08:55 PM CDT We're big fans of movie robots, and even cross-overs where a biological monster becomes someone's mechanical nightmare.

Helpful Canine Robot Assists Elderly, Bites Limbs

EL-E robot to smother grandma, crush your Aibo

MIT Technology Review writes:

researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are developing robots that mimic the relationship between humans and their canine helpers.

Industrious robotics researchers have done it again -- those geniuses are sure to put us upon the brink of cataclysm.

The latest version of El-E has been upgraded so that, in addition to responding to a laser pointer, it understands voice commands and can perform a wider range of tasks.

By "performing a wider range of tasks", we can conclude that means "value added features" such as:

• menacing family and children


• pilfering your personal possessions


• crushing your larynx

How long will it take before El-E helps to start the robot uprising?