Are your snipers bored of the same old stationary, predictable cardboard targets? What they need is disconcertingly realistic acting robotic ones! The Australian Defense Force and Marathon Robotics took a number of two-wheeled RMP 200 Segway robots, placed hoodie-clad foam dummies on top, armored the bottoms, and then programmed them to wander randomly around a small village. A sniper perched up on a hill then picks off his target and, like magic, the remaining robots all scatter automatically in a game way more fun than Modern Warfare could ever hope to be. There’s a video of that after the break, along with an RMP 400 doing some sweet jumps off-road, even roaring up stairs. The YouTube channel at the source link has plenty more Segway demos, some new and some old, so if you have some time to kill today you know where to click.

Turns out that there’s a financial center in Madrid, Spain which is so damn big and confusing to navigate that you’ll desperately need these multilingual robots to guide you around. Here’s how it works—in-action video and all: More

Santander’s Group City in Madrid is a big place; nine buildings sheltering 5,500 employees of one of the largest banks in the world. Guiding visitors around such a massive complex is a challenge, and what’s the best way to solve any challenge? Robots , of course. Santander turned to YDreams, who we’ve seen before playing with augmented reality , but in this case produced something more tangible: a fleet of little red guys called “Interactive Guest Assistants” that use swarm interactions to guide fat cat bankers to their next conference — and maybe to face off against the evil Maximilian in a harrowing battle at the end of the movie. There’s also a giant virtual wall full of boring financial information presented in fancy ways, even an augmented reality map of the complex, all shown in a video after the break. It’s the bots we like the best, so we’ll be ordering a gaggle to guide our own visitors — to their doom

For some reason, CBS decided to actually allow late-night talk show host Craig Ferguson to have this robot skeleton companion. Mythbusters’ Grant Imahara built the odd—and slightly freaky—fellow and then taught him the Robot Skeleton Sidekick Laws: More

To promote his book Dot Robot: Atomic Swarm , children’s author Jason Bradbury built a replica of one of the characters, Punk. The only trouble is that—with some CGI help—the spiky, spherical robot turned against his creator. More

In the narrow confines of the International Space Station , every cubic inch counts, but that won’t necessarily keep NASA from building a rec room. When the Leonardo Pressurized Multipurpose Module (PMM) launches in September 2010, NASA is considering turning it into a internet-connected “man cave” isolated and quiet enough for astronauts to tweet in privacy. The connection’s nothing special — science officer T.J. Creamer compared it to that of a 14.4K modem capable of only tweets, text articles and basic browsing — but Universe Today reports that they will also have a robotic servant, the Robonaut 2 , to play with. Imagine a cramped world without fresh water or YouTube, but where you can program a state-of-the-art robot to perform monotonous tasks..

So you saw that the first MOTO smartphone touchscreen comparison was done with a fleshy humanoid controlling the testing finger and discounted it as scientifically flawed? Well, MOTO’s back and this time the arm of judgment is operated by a coldly mechanical and ruthlessly precise robot — a machine in itself, we’ll assume the robot is intrinsically immune to developing fanboy tendencies. Joining the iPhone, Droid Eris, Droid, and Nexus One of the earlier test are Palm’s Pre and RIM’s BlackBerry Storm 2, whose results you can see at the source link below. The full test methodology is also explained there, including a list of the drawing apps used, which were selected with a view to minimizing smoothing algorithms that may prejudice the outcome. We’re not gonna tell you who won, you have eyes of your own after all, and will just direct you after the break for the full robot-on-smartphone video action.

We wanted to tell you what Spike Jonze’s new web film I’m Here is all about, we really did, and not just because it reportedly has robots in it — though that was certainly a major factor in the decision. But after we crossed the virtual street to the virtual box office, we were informed that there were no seats left in the virtual theater. Imagine that. So instead of providing our impressions here, we’ll just give you the facts.

While we’ve seen no shortage of smartphone - powered robots in the past, the Nokia camp has been sadly under-represented. But, there’s a new one coming to balance things out, a machine called Niko that has Lego Mindstorm NXT 2.0 components for a body and an N900 for a brain. The bot has been under construction for a few weeks but it has just made its YouTube debut with the short video posted after the break, showing it roving around and taking a photo whenever it bumps into something. When all systems are go and the machine is set free Niko will be posting messages and pictures to Twitter describing its every move in thrilling detail. We can’t wait for it to start picking fights with @CourtneyLoveUK.

Microsoft’s MIX 10 Windows Phone app demos were highlighted by a robotic t-shirt cannon entirely controlled by a WP7S app, and the code monkeys behind the project are now back with a full breakdown of how things were achieved — the bot was built on a standard battle-bot chassis, which was then modded with the cannons and an HP Envy laptop for control purposes. Just to drill in the point about how familiar development for the new mobile OS will be, the MS guys point out that outsider assistance on the project was recruited under the pretext that what was being built were “out of the browser” Silverlight apps for the desktop. Very crafty. We’ve got video of the cannon in action waiting after the break, along with an image of the Phone controls. Continue reading Windows Phone 7 Series T-shirt cannon gets detailed, redefines ‘mobile warfare’ Windows Phone 7 Series T-shirt cannon gets detailed, redefines ‘mobile warfare’ originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 09:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds