Automaton

At a CES press conference yesterday, Toyota presented its semi-autonomous Lexus Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle, a car designed to take over from you when an accident is imminent to keep you in one piece. 

One of the best robotics kits is now even better. Lego is unveiling its new Mindstorms EV3 kit today at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), in Las Vegas. Check out the new features.

It's that weird time of year, right after the holidays and right before the Consumer Electronics Show, when most technology news is still on vacation. Robots, evidently, are not on vacation this week, so neither are we. Yay!

Just ahead of CES next week, iRobot has announced a brand new pool cleaning robot, the Mirra 530, as well as international availability for the little Looj 330 gutter cleaner. 

Until today, the grossest robot we'd ever had the pleasure of meeting was Ecobot, which poops. This robot is much, much grosser. Its name is Vomiting Larry, and it's designed to do one thing: puke just like a human.

Looks like Samsung's robot vacuum has broken up with its previous family and gotten a new girlfriend. To what do we attribute this new level of feisty cleaning effectiveness? A pair of pop-out brushes designed to help the round robot get dirt and dust out of square corners.

Dear robots and the humans who love them,

Welcome to 2013. This is the year when everything is going to happen. We can confidently predict that just about every single day (weekday, at least), we'll have something new and amazing and robotic-y to share with you, because that's what we're here for. And we love doing it.

Oh, and we probably don't say this often enough, but thanks for reading. We're not here researching and writing articles every day for us, we're doing it for you. Whenever we meet one of you guys or gals in person, or get a nice email or a positive comment or anything like that, it makes us want to work even harder to bring you the best robotics news we possibly can. 2012 was a great year, and 2013 is going to be even better. So on behalf of Erico and myself and the rest of the contributors to IEEE Spectrum Automaton, thanks again, and keep in touch.

We know, it's Friday. And usually, we post a whole bunch o' videos on Fridays, but since we've done that for two out of our last three posts (!), we figured we'd give you a bit of a break. Instead, we've got this little quadrotor from Japan that's trying to be the next level of paranoia in private security.

And there will be videos!

Dyson has been working on a robot vacuum, for, like, ever, man. Seriously. This thing has been a project for a solid decade, perhaps longer. We haven't heard a peep on the subject for years, but apparently, Dyson released a few new normal vacuum models recently and dropped some hints about why the heck it's taking them so long to come out with a robot.

Rather than try to puzzle our way through all of the different holidays and whatnot that seem to happen this time of year, we're going to follow in the path blazed by the City of Birmingham in 1997 and just go with a friendly, all embracing, and politically not-incorrect "Happy Winterval!"

Robots, being robots, celebrate their own festivities without telling us about any of them, but they nonetheless get conscripted into what we've going on. Before we head off for a few (very few!) vacation days, here's a bunch of robots that have been programmed with all sorts of holiday cheer.