Highlights from Wired.com:

A robot has taught itself to smile, frown, and make other human facial expressions using machine learning.

To get the incredibly realistic Einstein robot to make facial expressions, researchers used to have to program each of its 31 artificial muscles individually through trial and error. Now, computer scientists from the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego have used machine learning to enable the robot to learn expressions on its own.

Highlights from MIT Technology Review:

European researchers have developed a robot capable of moving autonomously using humanlike visual processing. The robot is helping the researchers explore how the brain responds to its environment while the body is in motion. What they discover could lead to machines that are better able to navigate through cluttered environments.

Highlights from the New York Times::

Willow Garage, a Silicon Valley robotics research group, said that its experimental PR2 robot, which has wheels and can travel at speeds up to a mile and a quarter per hour, was able to open and pass through 10 doors and plug itself into 10 standard wall sockets in less than an hour. In a different test, the same robot completed a marathon in the company’s office, traveling 26.2 miles. PR2 will not compete with humans yet; it took more than four days.

It may eat flies and stink to high heaven, but if this robot works, it will be an important step towards making robots fully autonomous.

To survive without human help, a robot needs to be able to generate its own energy. So Chris Melhuish and his team of robotics experts at the University of the West of England in Bristol are developing a robot that catches flies and digests them in a special reactor cell that generates electricity.

The Israeli military has been busy working on a robotic snake. Enjoy:

Highlights from Marketwatch.com:

The prevailing wisdom is that the personal robotics market resembles the personal computer market of the mid-1970s; many small companies with greater expertise in R&D than in marketing are trying to create a product for which others will develop applications. Proprietary specifications are giving way to standardized solutions, especially on the high end where the robot will have a full computer on board (or off-board, connected via Wi-Fi or 3G to a PC or the network cloud).

Highlights from the Register:

You've got your robots which can make copies of themselves, of course. That's pretty scary - a runaway exponentially-multiplying machine horde, potentially able to overrun the human race in an eyeblink. But how much more scary would it be if you had a machine which could not only make copies of itself once complete, but could also participate in its own construction while it was still being built?

Highlights from Science Daily:

European researchers in robotics, psychology and cognitive sciences have developed a robot that can predict the intentions of its human partner. This ability to anticipate (or question) actions could make human-robot interactions more natural.

Highlights from MSNBC:

Smart missiles, rolling robots, and flying drones currently controlled by humans, are being used on the battlefield more every day. But what happens when humans are taken out of the loop, and robots are left to make decisions, like who to kill or what to bomb, on their own?

The common use for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in civil life is in the agriculture sector, where they are used to assess how well crops are growing and are utilized to perform meteorological measurements. While there is a substantial demand for drones in other areas as well, two main barriers stand in the way of those who aim to bring the technology to practice - the drones' relatively large size and lack of maneuverability around obstacles. These drawbacks are especially significant in military operations.

Seeing a market opportunity, European researchers and companies have collaborated to form the EU-funded microDrone project, dedicated to developing a smaller, more maneuverable drone. According to AirRobot, one of the major companies participating in the project, the new drone would be capable of carrying out missions autonomously in places with a variety of obstacles. Moreover, emergency situations occurring in urban areas or inside buildings could be dealt with using the new UAV, what will eliminate the need to send human forces into unsafe areas.

One of the new drones is the mini-UAV, developed by AirRobot. The drone is about 50cm in diameter, weighs less than one kilogram and can carry loads of up to 200gr. It looks like a miniature helicopter with four propellers, which allow it to take off and land vertically. A protective band surrounds the machine, preventing it from harming people and its own structure in case of an accident.

The company developed both software and hardware of the drone, which allow the AirRobot to locate its position in the air, navigate autonomously, and respond to unexpected events, such as running into obstacles. Other features include mission planning, collision avoidance and trajectory determination. A special feature included is the ‘return home’ function, made available due to the program's visual memory map that stores information regarding the previous flight path.
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Full Article at The Future of Things

The face of war is changing, and it may no longer be a human one. Developing new technology has always been a cornerstone of a successful military force, but now those technologies are steadily moving human soldiers from combat to management positions. Virtually every major military power is working on robotic weapons. In short, we’re outsourcing more and more of war into the hands of robots and computers. Even the conventional foot soldier has robotic and biological augmentation in his/her future. Today, Singularity Hub is taking a wide-angle look at these changes and how they will change the nature of war and our world.

The next big step in cancer treatment might be small enough to balance on a grain of salt.

Researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have developed a miniature crawling robot, called ViRob, that can crawl through your lungs, find a tumor, and zap it with drugs. The bot, which is one millimeter long and four millimeters from end to end, can snake its way through the body, slipping into blood vessels and navigating through the respiratory and digestive systems, Innerspace style.

Other mini-robots have been designed to take a voyage into the body. But thanks to tiny arms that help it grip vessel walls , ViRob is the first microbot that can tunnel between different body cavities. It’s controlled by an electromagnetic field outside of the robot that creates a vibration that propels ViRob forward.

In lab tests, the robot has traveled up to nine millimeters per second and can commute through body fluids ranging from blood to bile, making it a versatile tool that can race through a vein and burrow into an organ. Its designers even hope to accessorize it with equipment such as a wee camera and a mini pair of tongs, to get that close-up view of those alveoli at work.  The researchers are officially introducing the device at the upcoming ILSI-Biomed Conference in Tel Aviv.

Article from Discover Magazine

Robots wag their tail fins and bob along like bathtub toys in a pool at a Vassar College lab. Their actions are dictated by microprocessors housed in round plastic containers, the sort you'd store soup in.

It hardly looks like it, but the two swimming robots were set loose in the little pool to study evolution, acting out predator-prey encounters from roughly 540 million years ago.

The prey robot, dubbed Preyro, can simulate evolution.

This is not like robot evolution in the "Terminator" movie sense of machines turning on their human masters. Instead, Vassar biology andcognitive science professor John Long and his students can make changes to the tail of Preyro to see which designs help it avoid the predator robot.

"We're applying selection," Long explains, "just like natural selection."

Long is among a small group of researchers worldwide studying biology and evolution with the help of robots that can do things like shimmy through water or slither up shores. Long's robots, for instance, test theories on the development of stiffer backbones. The researchers believe the machines will catch on as technological advances allow robots to mimic animals far better than before.
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Full Article from the AP