Automaton

We hope you and your robots made it through Hurricane Sandy unscathed, and if you're still without food or power, just remember that robots can be powered by humans but not vice versa. So watch your back. Here's our advice: keep your electronic friends distracted with this week's Video Friday.

We love jumping robots, and not just because they're so much fun to watch. Jumping is also a great way to get around: it's far more efficient than flying, and much more versatile than driving or walking or crawling. Jumping robots do still need a big burst of power to get off the ground, but after 20,000 jumps worth of analysis, researchers at Georgia Tech have found a secret that makes robotic hops ten times more efficient.

This is CIROS, a household service robot from the Korean Institute of Science and Technology, and it's going to take that giant knife right there and use it to whip up a big fat cucumber salad for you while definitely not stabbing any puny human meatbags.

For all that Willow Garage contributes to the robotics community, it's not often that they release new hardware. They've got the PR2, the TurtleBot, the PR3 and PR4 (oops, we can't tell you about them yet, bwahahaha), and that's about it. So when Willow comes up with something new, it's usually worth paying attention, and they've announced a new 3D printed adaptive gripper design for the PR2: the Velo 2G.

The official induction ceremony for the Robot Hall of Fame took place at at Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh last week. Over 17,000 people cast votes online to choose which are the four best robots of 2012, and which robots totally suck. We kid! If it was up to us, all of these robots would have made it in, and we're still holding out hope that a few of them will come back for the next round. But until that happens, here are the winners, along with some of our favorite video clips.

Phew, what a week! I don't know about you, but I'm near robotted out. HA, just kidding, that'll never happen. There's no such thing as too much robot news, and I hope you're with me, 'cause it's Video Friday and there's lots to see.

Bossa Nova Robotics has just introduced a brand new research platform based on Carnegie Mellon's ballbot spherical locomotion platform. Called "mObi" (which I'll be capitalizing "Mobi" because, seriously now, c'mon guys), it's "the first step towards the creation of a 21st century personal robotics platform for everyday consumers."

Wow. I mean, seriously, wow. We've been incredibly excited to see the progress that Boston Dynamics has been making on ATLAS in preparation for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, but we had no idea what to expect from the challenge's Track A teams, each of whom will be designing and building their own robot with capabilities comparable to what we've seen ATLAS do.

We’re used to thinking of robot swarms as consisting of lots and lots of similar robots working together. What we’re starting to see now, though, are swarms of heterogeneous robots, where you get different robots combining their powers to make each other more efficient and more capable. One of the first projects to really make this work was Swarmanoid, with teams of footbots and handbots and eyebots, and researchers presented a similar idea at IROS earlier this month, using an AR Drone to help a swarm of self-assembling ground robots to climb over a hill.

Our first run-in with the TurtleBot 2 was back in May at ROSCon, and since then, things have been quiet. Lots of work has been going on behind the scenes though, and today, Clearpath Robotics is announcing that they've (finally!) gotten the TurtleBot 2 up for pre-order.