Robot

Developer Charlie Diaz has created a miniature prototype complete with functional robotic arms. His guide uses a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, an 8BitDo bluetooth remote, and a 3D printer. Diaz originally tried a full-sized costume, but found that its legs “contacted the ground and got stuck, preventing the walking motion”.

Today I learned there’s a piano-playing animatronic puppet that’s been roaming around San Francisco serenading the locals with Vanessa Carlton’s hit single A Thousand Miles.

At a time when two of Hollywood’s three big labor unions are striking over — among other things — the proliferation of artificial intelligence tools that stand to threaten their livelihoods, the latest trailer for Gareth Edwards’ The Creator just hits... you know, different.

After lingering too long in arm wrestling YouTube, so now the site’s algorithm now thinks it’s all I care about. As an unironic fan of Over the Top, a sweaty Sylvester Stallone film about a truck driver who joins an arm-wrestling tournament to win the love of his son, I’m not sure it’s wrong.

Last week, Will Cogley published a video showing how he fused a vintage TV with animatronics and Alexa to create something infinitely more charming than Amazon’s Astro.

Researchers at the University of Maryland’s Small Artifacts Lab are working on a “wearable robot” called Calico. It appears that you sew a magnetic track onto your clothing, which Calico uses to run up and down your body.

When we wrote about Engineered Arts’ Ameca android last year, the company said it wants to integrate chatbot functionality, and since then it has done so, using one of the most prominent chatbots, ChatGPT-3 (GPT-4 was too slow). In his conversation with The Verge, Engineered Arts CEO Will Jackson said:

Intrinsic revealed Intrinsic Flowstate on Monday, which it describes as “an intuitive, web-based developer environment to build robotic applications from concept to deployment.” You can watch Intrinsic’s product keynote, which explains more about Flowstate, right here.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts seems it’s going to be busy as hell trying to give Beast Wars stans what they want, but this new clip of the Autobots and Maximals squaring off in the jungle could honestly be the whole movie, and it’d be incredible.

Amazon’s Astro is now $1,599 and still requires an invite; the company originally said it’d go from $999 to $1,449 once the invite-only period was over.

A startup named Figure has come out of stealth and is promising to build a humanoid similar to the much-hyped Tesla Bot.

This is, to me, a perfect Lego video — just a person putting bricks together to make a fun and clever idea, then showing it in action.

Boston Dynamics is best know for Spot and Atlas, but don’t forget the company also sells Stretch — a machine does what we think of as “proper work,” aka moving boxes in warehouses.

Boston Dynamics’ bipedal robots have come a long way, but if they can’t turn everything and anything into a jump shot or dunk, then they still have a long way to go.

It’s not quite as proficient as that one drumming mascot, but it’s still fun to watch this Xiaomi robot play some beats. Now somebody teach it some rudiments.

Just in case you missed Elon Musk’s “show and tell” about brain-computer interfaces last night, we have the key details for you, viewable in less than 15 minutes.

NASA and the European Space Agency are developing a plan to bring interplanetary rock samples — already collected by the Perseverance rover — from Mars back to Earth by 2033.

Only the strong survive, robot. Choo choo! I’m a train.