The table baits a mouse up through one oversized leg and to the center of the table, where a trapdoor opens and they fall into a chamber full of microbes which digest the rodent and use the energy to power the table's electronics (presumably the sensor that detects the mouse). Similarly, a digital clock is powered with the same type of microbial fuel cell, collecting its prey with flypaper. A spherical lampshade with holes modeled after the infamous Pitcher plant lures flies in, but they are unable to escape and eventually fall into the bottom of the light, where they become fuel. They've also modified a UV fly-zapper to retrieve power from the fly corpses it creates.

Navy officials and military developers are beaming with smiles of success for they are the proud papas of the newest military marvel: a robotic jet fighter. The X-47B, built by Northrop Grumman, completed its first successful test flight on February 4th at Edwards Air Force Base in California without the assistance of an onboard or remote human pilot. It’s all automated. The aircraft’s sleek tailless design will make it harder to spot on radar, but proves a unique challenge for an unmanned aerial system (UAS). Yet the X-47B pulled off the historic test flight with great success, as you’ll see in the video below. The task ahead will prove much harder. The US Navy is looking to place the robot jet fighter on aircraft carriers in the next decade, with ocean-located trials slated for 2013.

Freshman Lyndon Baty’s immune system is so fragile he can’t risk being surrounded by people his own age, yet he attends classes at his high school in Knox City, Texas every day. All thanks to a robot. The Vgo telepresence platform is a four foot tall bot on wheels with a small screen, camera, speakers and microphone at the top. Baty logs into the robot remotely from his home, using his PC and a webcam to teleconference into his classes. Baty can drive Vgo around his school, switching between classes just like regular students. For a boy that has spent much of his life sick and isolated from his peers, Vgo not only represents a chance at a better education, it’s also an opportunity for freedom and comradery.

The robot theme park, which the government says is the first of its kind in the world, will feature a number of attractions such as entertainment facilities, exhibition halls, research and development centers, education buildings and industrial support facilities, officials said.

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The Incheon robot theme park will cost 784.5 billion won ($562.3 million), of which 680.5 billion won comes from private investors, 52 billion won from the central government, and the other 52 billion won from the local government, according to ministry officials. The construction will begin in 2010 and be completed by 2013, they said.

Two recent studies show that roboticists are applying some fresh thinking to the building and operation of robot hands, and a third suggests why the work is so important – it could be vital for domestic robots learning how to be useful around the home.

A BLOG ABOUT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) AND ROBOTICS.

Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species.

Looking largely to inspire dreams of space among the Japanese, a manufacturing cooperative named Astro-Technology SOHLA announced on April 27th that they are planning to create and send a two-legged humanoid robot to the moon, have it draw the Japanese flag on the surface, and then hopefully get it back to the Earth, all by the year 2015.

[W]e describe selected studies of experimental evolution with robots to illustrate how the process of natural selection can lead to the evolution of complex traits such as adaptive behaviours. Just a few hundred generations of selection are sufficient to allow robots to evolve collision-free movement, homing, sophisticated predator versus prey strategies, coadaptation of brains and bodies, cooperation, and even altruism. In all cases this occurred via selection in robots controlled by a simple neural network, which mutated randomly.

A more recent 2009 study, again at Lausanne, suggests that swarms of bots don't just evolve cooperative strategies to find food (or avoid poison), they can also evolve the ability to deceive. Bots equipped with artificial neural networks and programmed to find food eventually learn to conceal their visual signals from other robots to keep the food for themselves.