Automaton

UPDATE 11:37 p.m. EST: 

Here is Willow's response in full:

Willow Garage has decided to enter the world of commercial opportunities with an eye to becoming a self-sustaining company. This is an important change to our funding model.

The success of the PR2 personal robot and of ROS will continue. There are close to 50 PR2 robots in the world and Willow Garage support of the platform will not diminish. And of course, ROS, as an open source platform, will continue independent of our business model choices. In addition to Willow Garage, its supporters include the Open Source Robotics Foundation and all the other contributors in the ROS community (academic, industrial and individual) who have made it the platform of choice for Robotics.

While Willow declined to comment on our original story before we posted it, as far as we can tell Willow's response doesn't directly contradict any of the information that multiple sources (including current Willow employees and past Willow employees) have told us. Our concern is that if the change of funding model is as simple and as innocuous as Willow's post makes it sound, we would not have received multiple, consistent tips over the weekend that something very serious had happened. Our original headline, stating that the company was to shut down, reflected the information that these sources gave to us. We now have decided to update it in response to Willow's official statement. We hope to receive further clarification from the company.

IEEE Spectrum has learned that Willow Garage, the Silicon Valley robotics powerhouse that brought the world the PR2, ROS, TurtleBot, and several robotics spinoffs, will likely be dissolving within the next few months.

Well, it was only a matter of time: first, there were robot swarms on the ground. Then, there were robot swarms in the air. And now, we've got robot swarms taking over a swimming pool. Run for the hills! Or really, you'll probably be fine running for any sort of dry land if you want to escape this swarm of robotic boats. But why would you want to do that? It's not like they're part of some sort of DARPA project that will one day take over the world or something. Nope, definitely nothing like that.

Man, what I wouldn't give to have the opportunity to poke a quadrotor with a stick and have it not immediately crash into something. I always wonder if the incredible people who work in these robotics labs get up every morning and go into work and are like OMG ROBOTS!!! all day. Maybe it wears off, but every once in a while, I hope they get to take a step back and realize how jealous the rest of us are. Every Video Friday, we get even more jealous, and this week is no exception.

A $1 million dollar bionic something or other is now on display at the London Science Museum. It's not really a man, and it's not really a robot. It's not really a cyborg, either, although that might be the closest accurate descriptor. What it is, is a showcase of all of the artificial systems we can install in humans to try and fix things that aren't working, along with a look towards the future of augmented biology, all stuffed into a human form.

Rex, as this, er, project, is called, was put together out of $1 million work of artificial body parts by Shadow Robot Company to be featured as part of a documentary on BBC's Channel 4 entitled "How to Build a Bionic Man." Here's a preview:

This is the RobotsLab Box. It's a giant box, and it's full of robots. As if that wasn't enough, it's also full of a tablet which is full of a complete STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) curriculum that uses the robots as tools to show things like math and physics in action. The Box is designed to make it easy and affordable for teachers to drop a bunch of awesome robots right into the classroom, and even though I'm not a teacher or a student, I want one.

It's hard to tell how tiny this helicopter is from the above pic. But it's damn tiny. It's only four inches long (about 10 centimeters), and weighs just 16 grams, but will happily carry a pan-and-tilt camera that streams video back to a base station. It's called the Black Hornet, and it's . . . adorable.

I don't know which one of you out there still subscribes to print magazines (besides IEEE Spectrum's excellent and award-winning print magazine, of course), but there's this out there called Time that I guess some people read or something, and this month they've got a couple of very good stories on drones.

RoboCup isn't happening until July, but that's cool, because vids are already showing up on YouTube, and 2013 looks like it'll be a fantastic year. It's also going to be a fantastic year for quadrotors, a fantastic year for space robots... Heck, robots are just coming up fantastic. But what else is new, right? Watch some fantastic vids of robots doing fantastic stuff, 'cause it's Video Friday.

People are always so worried about robots gaining sentience and killing all humans, but what about humans, who already are sentient (mostly), mercilessly killing robots every time we turn them off? We're setting a bad example, and robots tend to have very long memories reliable hard drives. As it turns out, though, when you put people in the position of seeing robots as having their own intelligence, it becomes very difficult for most of us to flip the switch. Especially if the robot is begging us not to.

If Opportunity and Curiosity aren't impressive enough robots for you, you should probably have your head examined, but until you can find the time for that, here are some other fairly awesome robots from NASA that have been in the news this week: one of them pumps gas, and the other one digs dirt. Yeah, maybe they don't sound awesome, but just trust us on this, okay?