And for the life of me, I’d swear it was the headquarters from Danger Diabolik.

HQ features include :

• German submarine engines for backup power: Backup power is handled by two Maybach MTU diesel engines producing 1.5 Megawatt of power.
• Just for fun the people at Pionen have also installed the warning system (sound horns) from the original German submarine.
• Triple redundancy Internet backbone access: The network has full redundancy with both fiber optics and extra copper lines with three different physical ways into the mountain.
• Work environment with simulated daylight and greenhouses: For a pleasant working environment the data center has simulated daylight, greenhouses, waterfalls and a huge 2600-liter salt water fish tank.  ( Presumably filled with sharks.  Sharks with laser beams. )

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If anyone knows how I can apply to become a henchman, please drop me a line.

Link

The result, he’s about to take halfway around the world.  The vehicle is a modified Rage Motorsport off-road racing buggy, and flies at speeds up to 80mph.   With chief pilot and expedition organiser Neil Laughton, Cardozo will fly and drive the two-seater more than 3,700 miles to Timbuktu. Setting off on January 14, they will take about 40 days to reach the city in Mali, west Africa.

Somehow, it’s … different than I’d pictured.  But hey, flying car!

Link

“A New Mexico based company have started production on hot tub-sized nuclear generators designed to power communities across America.

Powered by low-enriched uranium fuel, each Hyperion Power Module will produce enough clean, safe and environmentally friendly energy to reliably power 20,000 standard American homes for 10cents per watt…

Link

There isn’t much descriptive text, but it looks to be a quadruped plant holder that moves around the apartment, tracking the sun.  It’s a great looking combination of wooden legs, pegged wooden linkages and wicker casing, materials seldom seen in robotics.  And it’s hard not to love animated furniture.

Link (via Neatorama)

Editor of MIT Press’ The Robotics Review, President of the International Foundation of Robotics Research, Dr. Khatib’s recent research been focused on “human centered / human friendly robotics,” haptic interactions (including “lazy” robotic movement studies).

Each course comprises downloadable video lectures, handouts, assignments, exams, and transcripts. A complete online course catalog is available here.

And just to see what you’d be getting into, here’s the first video lecture from “Introduction to Robotics”

Link (via Device Guru)

“Nasa has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS in July were infected with a virus known as Gammima.AG.

The worm was first detected on earth in August 2007 and lurks on infected machines waiting to steal login names for popular online games….

The laptops infected with the virus were used to run nutritional programs and let the astronauts periodically send e-mail back to Earth.

The laptops carried by astronauts reportedly do not have any anti-virus software on them to prevent infection. ”

If NASA can’t secure a Windows machine as scrutinized and isolated as a laptop on the ISS, imagine how much harder it is to reliably lock down a home or office network.

Link

The competition’s goal is to have your robot “Buy things [in] the underground city”, which sounds fantastically sci-fi, post-apocalyptic chic. To accomplish this the robots may use both tele-operational control and autonomous behavior.

In the five minute qualifying rounds, robots were sent around with a shopping basket. Their mission: picking up 3 eggs and a small (robot-sized) t-shirt, placing them in the basket, and returning to their operators.

Needless to say, egg manipulation is extra-challenging for robot hands, and Robot Watch has some excellent video footage of robot-splattering trial and error.

Link (English machine-translated link here.)

Their core platform is a 17-servo humanoid robot with a remote control and a custom set of gui-oriented pc software focused on animation and integration of sensor accessory kits. While there’s only a few paragraphs of background information out so far, it looks like they’ll be offering optional orientation sensors, infra-red “weapon” gaming sensors and lights, and an interface board for additional servos and sensors.

The Mech RC comes in 2 body styles, a basic-black cylon-esque model, and a MechWarrior style “Ground Pounder” (pictured below-left)

The brochure also mentions a “coming soon” education-oriented model (below-right), with MS Robotics Studio integration, wireless BlueTooth connectivity, and an onboard camera. Sweet.

We can’t wait to find out more about this promising looking line of robots. No release date mentioned yet, but you’ll know more when we do.

Link - (via Toyology)

The work at Plymouth is an effort to apply human learning processes to robotic systems, teaching the robot word meanings and object recognition as if it were a small child.

“There will be speakers, a microphone and two cameras in the robot’s head, which [researcher] Belpaeme said will be able to pick out humans in a room, make eye contact, track human gaze and interpret pointing gestures and correlate them with what is being pointed at.

‘We are going to make the robot look cute and we are going to try to trick people into teaching the robot things just as they would a small child.’”

Link (via Ralph. Thanks Ralph!)

At 10:57 We get a good long look at Waseda University’s Wabot 2 playing the organ, with great commentary about robots and society from the late Professor Ichiro Kato.

And at 18:32, there’s a love scene from German designer / futurist Luigi Colani’s Robot Theater. A few years back I saw the robot actors on display at Nagoya’s Robot Museum. Seeing them in motion here just made my morning.

Of course there are other good clips of the Expo’s mag-lev monorail, France’s proto-web MiniTel, and Sony’s first Jumbo-Tron.Colan