Automaton

This is a guest post. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of Automaton, IEEE Spectrum, or the IEEE. 

“Why do you cry, Gloria? Robbie was only a machine, just a nasty old machine. He wasn’t alive at all.”
“He was not no machine!” screamed Gloria fiercely and ungrammatically. “He was a person like you and me and he was my friend.”

– Isaac Asimov (1950)

Robots! Videos! Friday! This week's video theme is "a week without a video theme." Trust me, don't try to overthink it and just go watch a bunch of robot vids, guaranteed to be 95% theme-free.

We were pretty impressed with KMel's quadrotor performance at Cannes back in June, and the idea of using swarms of quadrotors to create light shows seems to be catching on. At the voestalpine Klangwolke Cloud in the Net festival in Austria, a swarm of 50 quadrotors teamed up to put on a giant animated show in the night sky.

Boston Dynamics' Cheetah robot has just set a new record for legged robots by sprinting at 28.3 mph. This, incidentally, is also faster than Olympic (human) champion Usain Bolt, who set the world record for the 100 meter dash with a speed of 27.8 mph back in 2009. Yes, this means that now there is officially no escape from a robot cheetah on a treadmill. You've been warned.

You're a terrible driver. Yes, you. Terrible. At least, you're terrible compared to a robot, which is smarter, faster, and more experienced. In fact, if we all just give up driving on highways and let robots take over for us, we could effectively end highway congestion as we know it by boosting the capacity of our existing roads by a staggering 273%.

This a robotic snake that SHOOTS A FRIKKIN' LASER OUT OF ITS FACE. What more could you POSSIBLY want on a Friday? Oh, you want lots more robot videos? Okay, we can do that too.

This is a WeeBot. It's one of the very few times it's okay to combine robots with babies, because a WeeBot is basically a way of turning a real baby into an unstoppable fusion of biology and engineering. Yes, we're talking about cyborg babies. Run!

Back in January, Adept's Erin Rapacki told us all that it's time to start 3D scanning the world. We agree with her, but it's not an easy thing to actually go and, you know, do. There are approximately 975 bajillion different objects out there in the world that robots need to know how to interact with, and the only way we're going to learn about them all (short of Google throwing approximately 975 bajillion dollars at the problem) is through a cooperative, crowdsourced effort like this new project called Kinect@Home.

A mola, or ocean sunfish, is a very big, very flat, and (in this reporter's opinion) rather silly looking tropical bony fish. Aerovioronment has used the sunfish as an inspiration for one of their latest proof of concept robots: Mola, an oceangoing robot that's powered by the sun.

Before Curiosity, before Opportunity, before Spirit, and before Sojourner, the very first robot to land on Mars was this little guy, way back in December of 1971. Called PrOP-M, the rover was part of the Soviet Union's Mars-3 mission, which had the potential to deploy the first ever mobile scientific instruments onto the Martian surface.