Automaton

What's up with roboticists and baseball bats? Last year, German researchers showed off their tough new robot arm by smashing it with a bat. Not to be outdone, iRobot now turns to the same "stress test" technique to prove that its robot hand can take some serious punishment and come out unscathed. Watch:

We all have that friend: The one who understandingly pats us on the back when we feel down, or shares our excitement when we're brimming with joy. They share our frowns when we've been wronged, and say "I've been there" when we confess our worries. Psychologists have long known that this kind of empathy is an important social construct for building relationships, and now researchers are testing whether it can bring us closer to robots, too.

A scene from the movie "Robot & Frank."

In this guest post, Frank Tobe, a robotics analyst and publisher of The Robot Report, describes the technologies that are beginning to come to market to help the elderly live in their homes as long as possible.

In 2003, BusinessWeek interviewed Joseph Engelberger, the robotics pioneer who helped invent the first industrial robot. The article was entitled "How Robots Lost Their Way." Included in the story was a plea for money to build an eldercare robot that Engelberger thought could be built with then-current technologies, rented for $600 per month, operated at a cost of $1.25 per hour (compared to healthcare homeworkers who cost around $15 per hour) and developed at a cost of less than $700,000.

Now this looks like fun: some roboticists at ETH Zurich plopped a GoPro onto a quadrotor and taught it to zip through a slalom course. We've got video of that, plus RoboBrrd on Indiegogo, a robot gymnast that's better than you. AND MORE, for this week's Video Friday.

Well, if you didn't already spend all of your pocket money on one of those NanoQ quadrotors, here's something that you'll want to blow the rest of it on: a robotic dragonfly that manages to be nearly as impressive as just about every other bio-inspired micro flying robot that we've ever seen, except somehow, this one is up for pre-order on Indiegogo for just a couple hundred bucks.

This is Nigel Ackland, and he's pouring himself a beer. With his robot hand.

Yesterday, we posted about some dirt cheap micro air vehicles on Kickstarter. Cheap hardware is great, but to make it do cool stuff, you usually need expensive (or at least, very clever) software. Researchers at Cornell have come up with a way to enable robotic aircraft to navigate around outdoor obstacles using just a single camera and hardware that mimics neuron architecture.

Back when I started writing about robots (get off my lawn, by the way), helicopters were big and complicated and dangerous and crashy. It's kind of amazing that now (or at least, soon, hopefully) you can get a tiny little quadrotor that can stabilize itself in flight for just under $100. Or, to put it another way, for just under $10,000, you could get a hundred of 'em.

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.