Robots

Robotics expert Robert Finkelstein has had a company in the field for nearly a quarter of a century without controversy. He never paid attention to blogs, didn't have a company website until last year and never felt the need to issue news releases about his work. That is, until blogs and news sites feasted on his EATR project. EATR, for Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot, is a robotic ground vehicle that Finkelstein's small company is designing with U.S.

Combine a land shark with a paddle-wheel boat, spice it with servo motors and radio transceivers, mix with water and what have you got? At Caltech, you have the year's biggest sporting event. At Tuesday's competition, engineering students at the Pasadena campus operated hand-built robots and maneuvered them through an obstacle course that included concrete walkways, a shallow pond and a finish line atop an arching bridge.

Scientists are scrambling to find an alternative landing site for a long-armed robot set to launch this summer on a mission to dig into Mars' icy north pole. The original landing spot was nixed after images beamed back by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showed scores of bus-sized boulders littered over old crater rims on flat plains. The gigantic rocks pose a danger to NASA's Phoenix Mars lander.

Watch out, Mickey Mouse. The Muppets may be sneaking up on you. Walt Disney Imagineering this week debuted its latest, cutting-edge creation: free-roaming, interacting audio-animatronic Muppets capable of "seeing" and "talking" to tourists -- and without a human puppeteer in sight.

NASA is testing a robot in one of Earth's deepest sinkholes in a first step toward searching for life on Jupiter's icy moon, Europa. El Zacaton, near the Gulf Coast of northeastern Mexico, is about 328 feet wide and 1,000 feet deep. Over the next two weeks, scientists plan to map and take samples in the dark, water-filled fissure with the 1.5-ton DEPTHX robot. It's a prelude to the proposed navigation of Europa's ice-capped oceans in about 20 years.

Scientists at Japan's Osaka University have developed a robot that acts like a toddler to study child development. The Child-Robot with Biomimetic Body, or CB2, is designed to move like a child between ages 1 and 3, although it stands just over 4 feet tall and weighs 73 pounds. It changes facial expressions and can rock back and forth. The robot moves smoothly with 56 actuators in lieu of muscle. It has 197 sensors for touch, small cameras working as eyes, and an audio sensor.

In Sebastian Thrun's vision of the future, freeways will be blissful havens from the everyday stresses of life. We will unwind during swift, smooth commutes free of aggressive lane changes, defensive brake-tapping and road rage. The SigAlert will be a distant memory. What will make this utopian autobahn possible? Robots. Robots don't get mad; they don't flip you the bird; they don't cut you off out of spite; and they definitely don't crash into one another. At least they're not supposed to.

DAFT PUNK, the Paris-born dance-music duo, is obsessed with robots. Not just any old heaps of metal that will vacuum floors but high-fashion, house-music-loving robots who move with silky, metronomic timing in mod helmets, black leather pants and jackets with "Daft Punk" emblazoned on the back in rhinestones.

RoboCops and robot soldiers got a little closer to reality last week as a maker of floor-cleaning automatons teamed with a stun-gun manufacturer to arm track-wheeled robots for the police and the Pentagon. By adding Tasers to robots it makes for the military, Burlington, Mass.-based IRobot Corp. says it hopes to give soldiers and law enforcement officers a defensive, nonlethal tool.

VICTORVILLE -- Members of a Carnegie Mellon University team of engineers and their tricked-out, driverless Chevy Tahoe known as "Boss" won $2 million for their victory in a Pentagon-sponsored robot race in the high desert, race officials announced Sunday. Tartan Racing's "Boss" turned in the top performance Saturday as it navigated through an urban-style obstacle course at a former Air Force base set up by race organizers from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.