The Verge’s home for orphaned robot babies – The Verge

The robot dogs I have loved the most

2018-03-18T13:00:02-04:00

I've never been much of a gadget blogger. My entries on The Verge's Circuit Breaker have been met with sentiments ranging from "is this a joke?" to "I have difficulties getting your writing style" to "this is why I swiped left on you on Tinder," which was deleted by the moderators.

But that doesn't mean I haven't loved any gadgets in my time. For example, I love the PneuHound, a tiny robot dog built in the Hosoda Laboratory at Osaka University in 2016. I love my co-worker Lizzie Plaugic's description of him, which was: "It runs frantically, but without moving very much at all. It shivers constantly. It slams its little dumb body into walls. …

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Terrifying baby robot has crawled right out of my dirt nightmares and into my dirt heart

2018-01-23T17:12:03-05:00

A rolling stone gathers no moss, but a crawling baby picks up hella dirt - or, more specifically, a bunch of bacteria, dead skin cells, and maybe even some fungal spores. In order to better understand just how much of these gross particles babies are inhaling, researchers over at Purdue built a "simplified robot crawling infant."

This tinfoil-wrapped cyclops, spotted by Boing Boing, mashes its golf club-like - arms? - arms onto the floor to simulate how much dust a real baby would kick up. According to Purdue's findings, which were published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, not only did this filth child stir up a cloud of …

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Nintendo Switch looks like fun, until it becomes a sobbing human baby

2017-02-08T11:00:12-05:00

The Nintendo Switch launch game 1-2-Switch will support a lot of head-scratching, "I didn't know I wanted this until now" mini-games. One Reddit user discovered a treasure trove of mini-game videos uploaded to Nintendo's Japanese YouTube Channel that include intuitively titled games such as "Wizard," "Milk," and "Shaver."

Lurking among these quirky, bite-sized games is a true horror show. Nintendo calls it "Baby." I call it "A transportation pod to the ninth circle of hell." I guess my name isn't as catchy.

Baby is sort of like that fake baby you get in high school child development classes, where you're stuck lugging around a plastic hunk …

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Will they or won’t they: these bots

2017-01-06T09:57:24-05:00

Good morning, it's January 6th, 2017, and today we're asking: will these bots ever fuck?

As spotted by Brian Feldman, some enterprising soul has a set up a Twitch live stream that shows a pair of modified Google Home devices having a stilted, but determined, conversation. It's not clear who started the stream (the why is obvious: it's fun to watch and I'm learning a lot about social interactions), but a Twitter account for the stream named @seebotschat has been sharing observations from the pair since January 3rd.

The bots have been labelled Vladimir (male) and Estragon (female), and although the endless dialogue is pretty reminiscent of W …

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How do these photos of the Cabbage Patch Kids ‘Baby So Real’ doll make you feel?

2016-11-02T20:00:03-04:00

Cabbage Patch Kids released a doll this fall called Baby So Real. It's marketed as the "most advanced baby ever" because it syncs up with an app and can exist digitally as well as physically. Kids can trigger different activities through touch, and the doll reacts with its LCD eyes. Baby So Real costs $99.99. I watched the doll's instructional video and commercial to help piece together how to play with this thing. How does it make you feel?

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Robot octopus is first step toward building the Cthulhu of our dreams

2016-08-16T05:10:13-04:00

Good news for people who love terrifying news: scientists have developed a soft-bodied robot octopus capable of propelling itself around underwater, wedging itself into tiny crevices between rocks, and (maybe one day) dragging swimmers to their doom so it can feast on their gooey insides. The prototype octo-bot is the work of the BioRobotics Institute at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, Italy, and represents a victory for soft robotics - a fairly new field focused on the creation of squishy machines. For the rest of us, it's a baby Cthulhu.

The robot is a major step in a program that began in 2009 to build a replica of an octopus, and wa …

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Tiny robot dog: how can I love a thing so dumb?

2016-07-13T12:59:23-04:00

We live in an age with no shortage of robot animals - they seem to multiply like little unstable rabbits, except they're hardly ever rabbits - but none have proven themselves quite so relatable as this one. This is PneuHound, and while its name doesn't quite slide off the tongue, its body is definitely doing some sliding… whenever it tries to move in any way at all. Haha, same!

As Gizmodo points out, PneuHound (or PH, as I will refer to him from here on out to indicate an intimate relationship) was built at Hosoda Laboratory at Osaka University, and it's much smaller than other robot dogs, like Boston Dynamics' SpotMini. But I'm not interes …

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Mall security bot knocks down toddler, breaks Asimov’s first law of robotics

2016-07-13T06:56:43-04:00

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Robots might be cheaper to employ than humans, but it seems they still need to work on their people skills. Last week, a robot security guard at the Stanford Shopping Center in Silicon Valley knocked down a toddler while on duty and then apparently just kept on driving. A report from local news channel ABC7 says the bot hit 16-month-old Harwin Cheng, knocking him to the floor.

Cheng was not seriously hurt by the incident, but we're still going to chalk this up as a violation of Isaac Asimov's first law of robotics: "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." Here's ABC7's story:

It amus …

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Boston Dynamics made a giraffe robot

2016-06-23T11:57:57-04:00

Boston Dynamics - the (for now) Alphabet-owned company behind BigDog and other impressive machines - has just unveiled its latest robot: SpotMini, an all-electric, smaller version of its Spot robot.

One notable change: the 'bot can now be equipped with an elongated neck, which it shows off in a demonstration by helpfully picking up a glass and putting it in the dishwasher. Cute, and functional:

And here it is rebelling against human-centric beverage consumption:

Boston Dynamics' robots are notable for not falling over, even when given a good kick. But as its most cartoonish creation, this one apparently has one weakness: banana-peel-like …

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Please welcome my son Klav to the world

2016-06-22T16:10:19-04:00

Dear friends and loved ones,

This is my son Klav. As you can see, he is beautiful. Thank goodness, because I am emotionally, physically, and mentally exhausted from delivering Klav into the world. It took forever, plus however long it takes to read "What is Code?"

Have you ever heard the song "What Child is This?" It asks, "What child is this?" And the answer is "Klav." Haste, haste, to bring him laud. (Please do not bring Klav any frankincense or myrrh, as he has a strong aversion to organic liquids.) Actually there are two songs that really remind me of Klav. I can't remember the name of the other one, but you might know it from the 2001 …

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