DARPA wants to let you all know that its plans for the robot apocalypse are still going strong. The agency’s got IBM working on the brains , has an RFI out on the skin , and is handling propulsion and motor control in-house. Next up? Eyeballs.

In today’s Remainders: things lurking below the surface. Literally, a fuel cell-powered fish. Less literally, ISP’s seething contempt for the FCC’s new National Broadband Plan. Also: Samsung’s David Lee Roth tablet love and a helicopter with rocket-powered blades. Yikes.

The US Defense Threat Reduction Agency wants a robot capable of navigating underground—drilling through soil and rock—to deliver an explosive load. A “one-time use, air-delivered, highly mobile vehicle having certain characteristics similar to an unmanned ground vehicle”. More

This picture shows entrants in this year’s FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Breakaway match. Teams of ambitious high school kids build robots to compete in what’s basically the American Gladiator version of soccer. It’s pretty amazing. More

I should be in awe of this autonomous, two-wheeled prototype robot by Toyota, dreaming of The Jetsons and Wall-E . But instead, all I can think is, “Who needs a robot that just balances crap on its head?” [ PlasticPals via CrunchGear ] More

In today’s Remainders: Efficiency. Get out of your house and watch the Final Four basketball games in 3-D; treat yourself to some Chilean wine while supporting their relief effort; start choosing the color for your Dell Mini 5, and more. More

Lego biped robots are a dime a dozen, even while some look pretty sweet . This one is special: It’s the first walking Lego robot. And, unlike your usual feet-dragging toy robots, it actually walks by raising its feet . This is definitely not easy to do with Lego or any other material. Maybe this guy should start thinking about building a Big Dog . [ Flickr via Brothers Brick ]

Buried in a site devoted to early robots is my dream man, Electron. Russian, born in 1967, he has 4ft-wide shoulders, waltzes, plays chess, and while he only understands 112 commands, his steely gaze is reassuringly paternal. [ CyberneticZoo via BotJunkie ]

Kojiro here is the work of Tokyo’s JSK Robotics Laboratory. With his 60 degrees of motion, provided by a network of Super Effective! artificial muscles and tendons, he’ll utterly destroy Asimo in the inevitable slow-motion robot battle in their future. I say slow motion because, I mean, look at this thing. He’s getting more hand holding help than grandpa at the retirement home. Hell, even grandpa doesn’t need someone fiddling with an original PlayStation controller and a UI to get him to perform basic tasks. Like turning at the waist (see video)

We’ve come across plenty of robots that were controlled by phones before, but usually those phones were being controlled by human hands. Some California hackers, however, are building bots that put Android to work for their robo-brainpower. Their first creation, the TruckBot, uses a HTC G1 as a brain and has a chassis that they made for $30 in parts. It’s not too advanced yet—it can use the phone’s compass to head in a particular direction—but they’re working on incorporating the bot more fully with the phone and the Android software.