Video Friday: Robot Heads Do K-Pop, Pleo Gets Shot, and PR2 Tackles a Cucumber

ICRA was a lot of serious business, and we've been posting a lot of serious business posts. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but part of the random fun of robots is that people do random fun stuff with them, and for video Friday this week we're getting back to that just a little bit.

And now, without further ado (or really any ado at all), here are four robotic heads singing K-pop:

In case you haven't immediately had enough K-pop for one day, here's the original music video (which has over 37 million views on YouTube) of Sorry, Sorry from Super Junior:

What's that? You want more? Okay crazypants, how about a live performance by 1,500 prisoners at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philipines: click here, share, and enjoy.

Pleo hasn't looked this poorly since we saw one get shredded by a Combot back in 2008, but it's possible that this little movie is all special effects and make-up and that no Pleos were actually harmed. Let's hope so!

[ prallplatte ]

I love how PR2 always looks 100 percent intent and focused, even if it's just making some popcorn at a trade show in Germany. This is James, the Beta Program PR2 belonging to TUM, and make sure and watch until the end to see some salt shaker action.

[ TUM ]

Speaking of PR2 (and it's often hard not to speak of PR2 when we're talking about robots doing cool stuff) someone at Cornell had the horrific idea of giving the robot a knife and teaching it to chop cucumbers. Protip: DO NOT GIVE ROBOTS KNIVES.

[ Cornell Personal Robotics ]

Robonaut has been keeping himself busy up on the ISS doing some autonomous work on his taskboard. The taskboard isn't hooked up to any critical systems (to prevent R2 from sending the ISS off to Mars by accident), but this testing is to make sure that the robot is capable of interacting with human controls in space.

We got a virtual ride on one of Adept's robots at ICRA, but there was no candy involved. No candy. Listen up, Adept: in the future, we expect there to be candy.

[ Adept ]

Finally, here's something to chew on: it's another presentation from ROSCon, featuring lightning talks, which is great for those of you with short attention spans: presenters get just three minutes each, and subjects range from programming structure to new hardware to robotic cinematography.

If you couldn't make it to ROSCon, Willow Garage filmed all of the presentations, and you can find everything on their YouTube channel here.