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There will be some new and nasty competition this year here at the 16th Robo-One robotic gladiatorial tournament: a warrior robot steered by its controller's neural signals.

The bipedal 'bot, which will see its first bouts when the combat tournament opens Saturday, is operated by Taku Ichikawa, a fourth year student at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo. He controls the robot through a set of electrodes applied to his head that measure his neural activity, making it possible to control the 50-centimeter tall, 2 kilogram robot just by thinking.

"As this is the first neural signal-controlled combat robot, I hope a lot of people will get to know about it," said an excited Ichikawa.

The mechanical gladiator is capable of three types of movement: walking forward, rotating right, and using its single arm for stabbing attacks. The 12 electrodes attached to Ichikawa's head relay his commands via a wireless connection.

Source: http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/national/archive/news/2009/09/25/20090925p2a00m0na015000c.html

The UBot whizzes around a carpeted conference room on its Segway-like wheels, holding aloft a yellow balloon. It hands the balloon to a three-fingered robotic arm named WAM, which gingerly accepts the gift.

The robots were just two of the multitude on display last month at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Pasadena, California. But this happy meeting of robotic beings hides a serious problem: while the robots might be collaborating, those making them are not. Each robot is individually manufactured to meet a specific need and more than likely built in isolation.

This sorry state of affairs is set to change. Roboticists have begun to think about what robots have in common and what aspects of their construction can be standardised, hopefully resulting in a basic operating system everyone can use. This would let roboticists focus their attention on taking the technology forward.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327206.300-robots-to-get-their-own-operating-system.html

Consider it one small step — or a roll, actually — for a robot, one not giant, but significant step for robotics.

Willow Garage, a Silicon Valley robotics research group, said that its experimental PR2 robot, which has wheels and can travel at speeds up to a mile and a quarter per hour, was able to open and pass through 10 doors and plug itself into 10 standard wall sockets in less than an hour. In a different test, the same robot completed a marathon in the company’s office, traveling 26.2 miles. PR2 will not compete with humans yet; it took more than four days.

For the person who wants to buy a fully functioning robot butler, this may not seem so impressive. But for roboticists and a new generation of technologists in Silicon Valley, this is a significant achievement, a step along the way to the personal robot industry.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/science/09robot.html?_r=1

Self-cleaning walls, counter tops, fabrics, even micro-robots that can walk on water -- all those things and more could be closer to reality because of research recently completed by scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and at Japan's RIKEN institute.

Humans have marveled for millennia at how water beads up and rolls off flowers, caterpillars and some insects, and how insects like water striders are able to walk effortlessly on water. It's a property called super hydrophobia and it's been examined seriously by scientists since at least the 1930s.

"A lot of people study this and engineers especially like the water strider because it can walk on water," said Xiao Cheng Zeng, Ameritas university professor of chemistry at UNL. "Their legs are super hydrophobic and each leg can hold about 15 times their weight. 'Hydrophobic' means water really doesn't like their legs and that's what keeps them on top. A lot of scientists and engineers want to develop surfaces that mimic this from nature."

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news160675932.html

This is about the closest thing to a Superman suit we've seen. Put it on, say its creators, and the motorized Hybrid Assistive Limb can "expand and improve physical capability" up to tenfold in activities such as walking, standing, and climbing stairs.

Through a sensor attached to the skin, "HAL" captures faint biosignals on the skin's surface that result from messages sent from the brain to muscles when a person attempts to move. A computer analyzes how much power the wearer intends to generate, then calculates the amount of torque needed to put limbs into action.

Especially noteworthy here is that the suit responds to intended motion, rather than actual motion.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10218178-1.html?tag=mncol;title