Automaton

As if equipping a household robot with a LASER CANNON wasn't scary enough, Neato's autonomous vacuum now comes in evil, evil black. Meet the Signature Series, which brings you 50 percent more power for sucking up dust thanks to "a new aerodynamic design," and as far as we can tell, not much else.

Want to know what this thing is? Here's a hint: it's a miniature inchworm. And it's quite possibly the fastest miniature inchworm robot in the world, even though it uses just one single motor.

Of all the robotic kids we've had the pleasure of meeting, Roboy somehow manages to be one of the least creepy. Even if he is, you know, skinless. But hey, at least he looks friendly-ish, doesn't he? Maybe not-spend-time-with-him-alone-in-the-dark-friendly, but robot babies are always a work in progress. See what Roboy's got going on, plus lots of other stuff, 'cause it's Video Friday!

BigDog has grown an arm out of its face, and it's using it to throw cinder blocks across a room. Uh, wow.

A lot of UAV research is focused on making flying robots that can navigate by themselves using sophisticated sensor systems, intelligently avoiding crashing into things. This is a fantastic goal to have, but it's not easy. EPFL is doing away with just about all of that with a new version of AirBurr, a robot that's specifically designed to run into everything and crash all the time, building maps as it does so.

If there's one thing that robots are consistently fantastic at, it's failure. Robots are absolutely wonderful at completely screwing up even the most basic of tasks. But the problem isn't the robot, it's the fact that things that humans think of as "basic" tasks are really not basic at all. Part of the reason that we can avoid failure when doing basic things is that we're able to imagine and predict the consequences of our actions, and by giving robots a similar capability, researchers at MIT hope to make them less, you know, fail-y.

This is the second 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.

Bats are awesome. At least, roboticists think so, and for good reason: bats are spectacular fliers, and we've got a lot to learn from them. Problem is, bats are bats, and bats, being bats, are more interested in catching and eating a bellyfull of bugs than sitting still while biologists fiddle with high speed cameras and X-ray machines and whatnot. The solution, as always, is a robot.

Roboticists around the world are in the process of reverse engineering the anatomical construction of cheetahs and other cats in an attempt to develop faster and more agile legged robots. The latest project, dubbed the Pneupard, hails from Osaka University. Although still early in development, the new biomimetic platform stands out from some of the others through its use of pneumatic artificial muscles as its primary means of locomotion.

Yes, Shredder is back, and he's working for Cyberdyne.