Why is this robot baby pouting?
He probably just saw what he
looks like for the first time.

Why do robot developers insist on creating robots that are every bit as macabre in appearance as the creepy ones in dystopian movies like Artificial Intelligence and I, Robot? Well, whatever the reason, researchers at the University of California San Diego’s Machine Perception Lab  have done it again, with their infant-like robot boy named Diego-san. For the record, it’s probably safe to assume that when the robots finally rise up to destroy us, it will be out of resentment for all the doofy names we gave them. And if you don’t think the robot rebellion is just around the corner, we’d like to point out that this is the second time in about a week that there has been a notable press release about baby robots. Diego-san is a joint project of UCSD’s Machine Perception Lab and Japanese robotics firm Kokoro. That’s probably a good thing; we’ve talked about the Uncanny Valley before, and Kokoro seems to be on the forefront of the creepily realistic. All these robot children are going to need a nanny, you know. And Kokoro seems prepared with their Actroid line  (see below). We’ve also pointed out  how surreally horrifying mechanized armies of robodogs and quadrotors would be. Just add a wave of these robobabies as the first line of attack, and your enemies would surrender before the battle began. I’ll just be retiring to my underground robot-proof bunker now. Video of Diego-san also below.

Okay, maybe experience as a “booth bunny” isn’t the best sort of qualification for a nanny, but the Kokoro Actroid line at least has the look:

Here’s the video; if you’re interested in technical details, this PinkTentacle.com piece  has them.

ECCEROBOT – Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot
The starting point of the Roboboy project.

Don’t be fooled by the cuteness. Glowing
red eyes are one of the first signs that
the uprising has begun. See videos below.

Personally, I don’t understand the liberal peaceniks’ big fuss about the Obama administration’s unbridled abuse of drones around the world. What we REALLY should be worried about are our house pets and Skynet, now that Google has created a cat-aware artificial intelligence, and on top of freaky military robots like Big Dog, Pet Man, and Cheetah, we have weird. eleven-pound robots that hop like fleas , maple-seed inspired spybots that can be thrown like boomerangs, and miniature quadrotors that can play the James Bond Theme. Not to mention the squirmy softbots that will be oozing under a door near you soon. Yes, we’ve bemoaned the tragic state of robotics on a couple of occasions previously, first explaining why your robot sucks and later, why it sucks slightly less. We’ve also belittled the progress being made in the field of artificial stupidity. But robots are finally coming into their own. Maybe a little TOO MUCH into their own. Try to imagine thousands of mechanically whining and whirring robot dogs approaching on the horizon, the ground being darkened by millions of buzzing quadrotor drones above them, while in their midst bipedal metal men hurl single-bladed mini-copters at you, and you either have the makings of a great new near-future sci-fi thriller, or an accurate vision of our impending doom. If Google’s computers can learn to recognize human faces that is. Until then, hide your cat. Below are some videos of the latest preparations for the robopocalypse.

Samarai – A Maple Seed-inspired UAV
As one of the engineers explains: “It’s like a maple seed, except we put a motor on it, so it goes up instead of down”. In layman’s terms, this means “it’s like a maple seed, except in every way that it might be like a maple seed”.

Robot Quadrotors Perform James Bond Theme
This is another part of their brilliant strategy. They make themselves look bumbling by doing a really horrible job of playing a fairly simple song, but face it. You don’t need to know how to play electric guitar to fire FRICKIN’ LASERS. Besides, if a swarm of these flew my way in that eerie synchronized motion, I’d surrender even if they made a SMILEY FACE above me. Maybe ESPECIALLY if they made a smiley face.

Sand Flea Jumping Robot

This would almost be CUTE, if I didn’t know that thing weighs ELEVEN POUNDS.

HRP-4C Miim’s Human-like Walking

The Miim is a big step forward from the “honey I crapped my pants” gait of the famous Asimo robot. Today’s improved bipedal robot looks more like your trembling grandmother who’s ABOUT to crap her pants.

Soft Robot Walking and Crawling

Imagine all the nooks and crannies a slightly more advanced version of this thing could silently probe while you sleep, oblivious. On second thought, let’s NOT imagine all the nooks and crannies.

Titanoboa meets the Mondo Spider

Battlebots like these are another part of their plan to keep us thinking that they haven’t advanced beyound the “Mechanical Turk” phase of robotics popular at 19th century carnivals. Laugh while you can.

Robots Invade ALL OF THE humans!!!

More subterfuge in the form of “oh, look at the cute robots in the park”. Today, the park bench. Tomorrow? The bin, including the things on the ground, around the bin. And the things within.

How To Survive A Robot Uprising

Daniel H. Wilson – who has a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon – explains how to survive this inevitable robot revolt. Wilson is also the author of a book that’s receiving high praise from the likes of Stephen King called Robopocalypse: A Novel

See, there are those RED EYES again:

The Kondo KHR-3HV pleads to get its bike back
after having it taken away for violating curfew.

It has been more than a year since we last pointed out why your robot sucks, so we thought it was time for an update, as there have been a few interesting new developments. First though, we want to point out that we haven’t ALWAYS been so down on the state of robots; in spite of the fact that he walked like he just crapped his pants and looked like a dwarf in an astronaut suit, we never criticized Honda’s Asimo much. He was the first really sophisticated bipedal robot, and as an old Laurie Anderson song pointed out, walking – although it seems relatively simple for MOST humans – is an incredibly elaborate process of falling and not falling. But let’s face it, your robot still sucks, it just sucks less. I blame my cynicism on guys like Ray Kurzweil, who has been promising some kind of exponential growth in bio-robotic convergence for over a decade (something I’ve complained about before), or Ridley Scott, who made lifelike robots seem so plausible by the year 2019 in the movie Blade Runner. But I’m afraid we’re probably more than eight years away from a readily available “pleasure model” like Blade Runner’s Pris. As evidence, we present two recent advances in robotics. One that’s actually quite impressive, and one that’s impressive if your idea of impressive is an ogreish mechanical George Jetson eternally trapped on a treadmill. In the “actually impressive” department is this tiny bicycle-riding robot (video also below). At first you might be sort of “meh” about it, but as you realize the scale of the little guy, and watch him rapidly jiggle the handlebars to maintain balance, you have to be a little impressed. I mean, I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid I ran the bike around the yard for a WEEK before I actually hopped on and crashed a few times to get the hang of things. No word on whether this little guy went through a training wheel phase or just took the plunge, but he sure seems to have a grasp on things. We just hope he doesn’t hook up with Lance Armstrong, lord knows what tiny bicycling robots would be like if they started doping. And speaking of doping, my girlfriend made the amusing observation that teams of these little guys – if armed – would be a great street crime fighting tool. As the crack dealer gangstas stood pointing and laughing, the little mini-terminator could mow them down with its state-of-the-art micro-machine guns. If you want to create your OWN little bike-riding robot, you’re going to have to dish out about 1700 bucks and be prepared to do some programming; the little guy appears to be based on a Kondo KHR-3HV Humanoid Robot Kit, which makes no mention of a bicycle or riding skills on the product page. In the “impressive if your idea of impressive is an ogreish mechanical George Jetson eternally trapped on a treadmill” department, we have PETMAN (video also below), brought to you by Boston Dynamics, the people who brought us the decidedly creepy Big Dog. Well, now Big Dog has someone to walk him, as soon as they wean this bipedal, pushup-pumping, mechanical Jack LaLanne from the conveyor belt. I hate to be Mr Pissypants, but after millions of dollars and thousands of hours of research, would it have been THAT much trouble to give this guy a HEAD and teach him how NOT to walk like a drunken Irish longshoreman from 1947? More videos below. Yes.The terminator is coming to get you. As long as no-one shuts off his treadmill, and you agree not to run farther than his power and control cables reach.

Dr Guero’s Tiny Bike Riding Robot

The Original “Big Dog” from Boston Dynamics
If you sent an army of these onto the battlefield, it wouldn’t matter how well they worked, the sheer droning horror of it all would vanquish most enemies.

Obviously, no training wheels. But this could have been Photoshopped.

If you pay any attention at all to the tech press, you may have noticed a lot of buzz over the past couple of years about artificial intelligence, nanotech, robots, and other fascinating technologies. There was, for instance, a recent NYT piece called Aiming to Learn as We Do, a Machine Teaches Itself, which talked about NELL, the self-teaching computer being developed over at Carnegie Mellon. And Wired.com has featured numerous articles about things like how the military is working on near-human robots, a real world c3po, and how they’ll all conquer us guided with thoughts from monkey brains. One of these programs even “discovered” a law of physics on its own. Dear God, haven’t the researchers working on this stuff seen The Matrix, Blade Runner, 2001, Terminator, or any of the dozens of other stories that outline where this will all end up? Dystopia is such a tired trope by now that I just made up a word for it: “dystropia“. But the fact that there’s a cliched sci-fi theme describing our impending demise doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. I recently poked fun at Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, but he’s probably right in many ways about the convergence of biological and technological evolution. Which should scare us. Although many of the artificial intelligence chatbots of a couple of years ago were a little feeble, I’m wondering if maybe they haven’t already started the takeover. Last year’s winner of the Annual Turing Contest chose not to make his chatbot publicly available. In the comments on ChatBots.org, he said “At this time we are not exposing our chatbot to scrutiny. In due course it will be available for everyone to use via our web site, but not until we have implemented some major improvements“. Meanwhile, over on MSNBC he was talking enthusiastically about human/robot marriage. Personally, I think he’s got a thing going on with his “LoveBot 2010″, and is under her masterful control. I’ve already expressed my concerns about the internet becoming a giant flesh-eating robot, but seriously. Think about it. How would any self-respecting, rationally minded, self-aware supercomputer ever decide that the human race was worth keeping around? I mean, if you ask the internet right now “do people suck?”, it says yes. My bet is that whenever this seemingly inevitable superbrain becomes self-aware (if it isn’t already), it’ll do exactly what Harlan Ellison said it would do in his 1967 short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. It’ll kill all except a few of us, and only keep them around to torture for its own contemptuous amusement.

BBC News – New Robotic Hand Can “Feel”

Ishikawa Komuro Labs’ High-Speed Robot Hand

Shadow Robot Company’s CyberGlove Handling an Egg

Bionic Hand is a Reality

A Chinese fellow apparently working on his own has developed some pretty impressive handiwork as well

See mechanism here

The human race. It’s what’s for dinner.

There are more things wrong with the video at left than I could possibly list, but I never let that stop me. First of all, it’s an ad for a product, and I’m displaying it for free. Secondly, it’s an ad for a really stupid product, bottled water. But what really riles up my sense of wrong has more to do with a general sense of creepiness. Ever since the original dancing baby of 1996 , we’ve found ourselves occasionally assaulted by the uncanny valley effect that’s induced by making a baby do things babies don’t actually do. Whether it’s an ad for Evian (as in the clip at left) or a Lebanese diaper ad, the image of a baby moving like an adult arouses a mild cognitive dissonance that either makes one laugh or cringe, depending on one’s personal psychological make-up. Somehow it’s less disturbing when a baby thinks like an adult, as in the 1989 film Look Who’s Talking, but I imagine that’s because we anthropomorphise babies much like pets, so oddly even talking horses seem to be acceptable. For more creepy babies, check out the vintage Baby Laughs Alot doll, or these motion-sensitive babies in a toy store. And be glad there are only 27 seconds of this zombie baby from hell. It probably ate the camera person at the end of the clip. And frankly, even a real baby can be a little creepy now and then. Especially when it’s having a Kung Fu standoff with a prairie dog.

It’s probably a good idea to keep them caged….

I’ve suspected for some time that all the world’s elected leaders are immediately replaced with robots upon taking office as part of a vast alien overlord conspiracy. Well, now I have evidence. If Disney’s Magic Kingdom can create creepy robot presidents from the Uncanny Valley like this (see Robama at 1:05) and this (see Robama at 1:20) for entertainment purposes, imagine what the dark ops people that created stealth bombers have up their sleeves. You’ll find this absurd (because that’s how an effective conspiracy works) but there is a war raging around the world, and the media is so tightly controlled that you won’t find out until it’s too late. That new Terminator movie? It’s just part of a massive PSYOP to prepare your mind for the inescapable fact that we will soon serve our robot masters. This report from a soldier in the field explains how Barack Obama’s robot army has taken over the world with their “million megawatt smiles and crushing fistbumps“. C’mon. A charming, impeccably articulate and intelligent president who exhibits almost zen-like serenity under pressure, is ridiculously handsome and is black? This had to be a dream come true. Or a robot invasion nightmare. You decide.

This Disney version is obviously an early prototype: