Automaton

Hurricanes are generally things that robots, humans, and everything else try to avoid. It's hard to study something, though, if you're constantly getting out of its way. There are some aircraft that are specifically designed for hurricane study, but they're big and expensive, and since they're stuffed full of humans, they can't do anything particularly risky. Such dangerous tasks are best left to robots, like this chubby little guy from the University of Florida.

Watching the live stream of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday, I nearly fell off my chair when Apple CEO Tim Cook called on stage a company that, he said, is using the iOS platform "to bring artificial intelligence and robotics into our daily lives." What?! Did I just hear the word robotics come out of Tim Cook's mouth? And what company could this be?

If you're wondering what the next trend in robotics is, look no farther than Video Friday to see what kinds of robots consistently end up in the news from week to week. Here's a hint: lately, it's been quadrotors. But as always, we have lots of other robots for you too. Lots of them.

When it comes to playing games against robots, the future doesn't look too bright for us humans. Machines will likely beat us, or are already beating us, at soccer, ping pong, chess, Go, baseball, basketball, rock-paper-scissors, iPhone games, and, of course, Jeopardy. Now add air hockey to the list.

Japanese researchers at Chiba University's Namiki Lab have developed an air-hockey robot that is skillful enough to compete against human players. It's not the first air-hockey robot developed, but the team led by Professor Akio Namiki has upped the ante: their robot changes its strategy based on its human opponent's playing style.

We saw lots of robots at 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). Like, seriously, lots of robots. Seriously. For real. This year's event had the largest exhibition hall (with the most real robots) that we've ever seen, and a lot of the interactive presentations featured real robots as well. We got as much of it on video and in pictures as we could, and smushed everything together in a fabulous montage and gallery, just for you.

Late last year, Willow Garage introduced the Velo 2G, a largely 3D-printed, tendon driven, underactuated gripper. It was just an alpha prototype, but we commented at the time that we were optimistic about the low cost of this thing when, or if, it ever became available.

Touch screens are nothing new, but this prototype from Microsoft uses a robot-mounted display to do something surprising: touch back.

One of the biggest companies in robotics has teamed up with one of the biggest in telepresence to create a new remote collaboration robot. iRobot and Cisco announced today they are working together to develop a robot called Ava 500 that can autonomously drive around an office and offers crisp HD video experience.

That is one confident looking robot right there, isn't it? He's walking the walk, because he knows he's on Video Friday, which automatically means fame and fortune. Or at least, as much fame and fortune as we can possibly provide, which (let's be honest) is probably not a lot. But it's something, and you can be a part of it, here and now. Read on!

We hear about lots of robots that could potentially be used for "search and rescue" or "disaster relief," because that's kind of what you say when you've made a robot that doesn't have a commercial or military application but you still need to come up with some task that it might be useful for. It's much rarer that we see these robots actually performing search and rescue or disaster relief tasks, which is why it's especially nice to see this firefighting robot from UCSD doing something that firefighters would find immediately useful.