machine-human - happy droids, bad robots and functional zombies

Wii Chef Robot in action – having a hard time learning how to whip the eggs and cut ham. Recipe of the Day: Ham ‘N Cheese omelet. Very cool.

AirJelly is a helium-filled balloon with an intelligent, adaptive mechanism. It has a two lithium-ion polymer battery to which the central electric motor is connected. Jelly also uses its tentacles to perform peristaltic movements and gently glide through the air.
Festo.com

Amazing typographic illustrations based on sans-serifs:

Artist: Jonathon Yule
Website: www.invdr.com

Yesterday I bought this magnificent book Robots – Spaceships & Other Tin Toys (Kitahara, Teruhisa / Shimizu, Yukio – Hardcover – 15.5×21.7 cm, – 352 pages – Multilingual Edition: German, French, English). This Taschen’s 25th anniversary special edition features the Tehurisa Kitahara collection of tin toys from the 50s and the 60s – various tin aeroplanes and ships, rockets, clockwork robots, the Coney Island Rocket Ride, Godzilla, Batman, Popeye, Fire Dept. cars, big American limousines, genuine precursors of today’s toys and grownup designs. An excellent gift for the boys (aka adults), this amazing book transported me back to childhood, a place of colorful dreams and interplanetary adventures.

Who, with more than 30, hasn’t had one of these in hands?

This class of robots is called “MDS” – mobile/dexterous/social. The purpose of the robots is to support research and education goals in human-robot interaction, teaming, and social learning.
For more details, visit xitome.com

Chop Shop’s designs are really cool! The one above depicts 51 different robots from movies, television shows, books, toys and even a robot from a famous classic rock album. Do you recognize some of them?

Meet the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. An on-board computer controls locomotion, servos the legs and handles a wide variety of sensors.

“Is love and marriage with robots an institute you can disparage? Not to computer pioneer David Levy. Continuing advances in computers and robotics, he thinks, will make legal marriages between Homo and Robo feasible by mid-century.”

By Charles Q. Choi / Scientific American