Automaton

Have you seen anything so terrifying made of origami? I think not! And even if you have seen something more terrifying, it's unlikely that it's ever chased you down and try to bite you, like this foldable robot bug can. See it skittering around, and more stuff that's almost as cool, in this week's Video Friday.

See this little guy smirking at you? Want to know how he got up there? A word of advice: as of right now, do not stand anywhere near a snake robot while looking like a tree, because these things will now fly right at you and go for your throat.

Last week, we showed you how Microsoft's new Kinect API lets you use your hands to draw on a painting program. But how about using gestures to create 3D models of any shape that you can use as Kinect avatars? No problem! That's exactly what Microsoft Research's Beijing team showed early this month at the company's TechFest 2013.

This is the third post in our Startup Spotlight series featuring new robotics companies from around the world. We're inviting representatives from the companies to describe their technologies and how they see the marketplace. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE.

Tonight at 10/9c, the Syfy channel airs another episode of Robot Combat League. It'll feature Carnegie Mellon PhD student, Robot Film Festival organizer, and overall friend of the blog Heather Knight driving a gigantic humanoid combat robot and trying to beat the screws out of another gigantic humanoid combat robot. "For me, it was really exciting to see actual, real robots instead of CGI characters," Heather tells us. And that, in a nutshell, is why it's worth giving this show a look.

Actroid-SIT, a lifelike robot from Japanese firm Kokoro, hasn't received as much attention as her cousin  Geminoid F, which happens to be a copy a real woman. But while Geminoid F is a teleoperated robot, Actroid-SIT can function autonomously, talking and gesturing while interacting with people. In fact, researchers have recently demonstrated how improvements to Actroid's behavior can make it look smarter and more expressive than your average android.

This is the first post in our TurtleBot tutorial series. Check back every week for new posts.

Can a robotics journalist with a degree in geology program a real robot to do cool new stuff? We're going to find out, with a new series of articles featuring the TurtleBot 2.

You know it's getting close to a major robotics conference (like this one) when unexpectedly awesome videos suddenly show up on the Internet out of nowhere. You know, like a drone that can fly by and grab stuff like a bald eagle. Sweet!

Bristlebots are robots without sensors or brains that do things that robots without sensors or brains do. As it turns out, this is a lot more than you might expect, since researchers at Harvard have shown that if you stick enough of them in a small space, they self-organize into swarms.

It has only been a few months since DARPA announced the teams competing in its upcoming Robotics Challenge, but already some of the robots are beginning to shape up. Take, for example, the exotic looking CHIMP robot built by a team at Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center. CHIMP (CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform) features tank-like treads on its arms and legs for tackling the bumpy terrain it will encounter as part of the challenge. The idea is to take advantage of both legged and wheeled locomotion, allowing the robot to scoot around low to the ground but stand up when necessary.