Creepy Shoulder Robot Wants to be Your Friend?

I found this creepy article while looking through the Komando blog which tells us about this group of Japanese researchers from Yamagata University who are developing a robot to keep you company....sort of. The "robot" consists of a wearable miniature humanoid in a controlling framework that sits on your shoulder. Creepy enough, but creepier still it can be remotely operated by your friends from anywhere, you know, like one of them good angel/devil bad angel/devil scenarios.....ick! Oh and I can just see the problems....I have five other brothers who would just LOVE to take control of this thing while I was trying to have a conversation or some sort....I know, because it is the same thing I would do....I know ASL see.... the possibilities are endless.... Nope, not going to give em the chance.....

Amazing Realistic New Robot 2010

Is it fascinating or just plain creepy? Here is an amazingly realistic, short demonstration of the humanoid platform, Actroid-F. According to the Wiki article

• An Actroid is a humanoid robot and android with strong visual human-likeness developed by Osaka University and manufactured by Kokoro Company Ltd. (the animatronics division of Sanrio). It was first unveiled at the 2003 International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo, Japan. Several different versions of the product have been produced since then.

NASA could put telepresence robots on Moon in 1000 days

You know those fancy gold robots that NASA has been experimenting with? Well according to an article in Gizmodo:

• NASA can put humanoids on the Moon in just 1000 days. They would be controlled by scientists on Earth using motion capture suits, giving them the feeling of being on the lunar surface.

This works only for the moon of course. Mars has a substantial signal delay, but the 3 second delay to the moon and back can easily be accounted for.

Below is some video of how that might look:



Read complete Gizmodo article here