Robotics

At the TED Conference, a Google Fellow showed off an automobile that can drive itself using nothing but sensors and cameras. The future is now!

The Geminoid DK project at Osaka University is producing androids that are becoming more lifelike each day.

A story about cheating in middle-eastern camel racing—and by the way, the jockeys are robots. Buried lede, or simply a case of the unevenly-distributed future?

In an age of ever-more fantastic gadgets, it's becoming received wisdom that we're all cyborgs now. But as implant hacker Lepht Anonym reminds us, the original vision of the term was dangerous and feral. Videos after the jump.

The head of the Philip K. Dick android, which went missing in 2006, has been rebuilt by Hanson Robotics. Who will help it come to grips with its strange and chequered past? Video after the jump.

A robot that solves Rubik's cube with Sisyphean aplomb, an avatar of something like the opposite of the uncanny valley.

A controversial radio-controlled flight over Manhattan brings a measure of joy and wonder to the New York City skyline.

German robotics company Festo offers a postfuturist menagerie: autonomous kites, silver air-jellyfish and flying robo-penguins.

Scientists at Tokyo Tech have tapped into the neurons of a male silk moth, connecting its tiny brain to a little wheeled robot. When the moth’s sense organs are exposed to female pheremones, the robot performs the silk moth’s mating dance.

The uncanny valley is getting crowded. A female-modeled version of Geminoid, roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro's creepy android, is now appearing opposite a human actor in Japan in a short play entitled Sayonara—as in, "sayonara, humans."