Isotropic

Totally tubular, man! Robots for teh Intertubes.
In the main, today’s robots are not that clever [to inspect pipes and shafts]. They cannot climb or navigate in vertical pipes – and very few have active joints. Cybernetics and optical measurement scientists at SINTEF are working on a solution.
SINTEF (2008, June 27). Robot That [...]

According to Hannah Hickey, in Underwater communication: Robofish are the ultimate in ocean robots, keeping in touch without scientists’ help (University of Washington), “The Robofish pack’s first assignment, beginning this summer, will be to trail a remote-controlled toy shark.”.
Robofish are unique in that that they can coordinate their activities and, due to underwater inter-communication, [...]

Do you want to have a conversation with your car, or perhaps an invisible passenger riding shotgun (if a talking car freaks you out too much)?

Years ago, Stanford communication and sociology researcher Clifford Nass wondered why some people treated their computers as humans, instead of machines, a question that led him down a path [...]

[Robin Murphy] envisions a robot that plays soothing music to trapped victims and features a monitor showing the faces of loved ones and rescuers trying to reach them. It will deliver water and transmit a victim’s vital signs to doctors. And it should be friendly, she said.

–Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler, A USF professor plans to add [...]

A post on ScienceDaily says “Salmonella bacteria can be turned into tiny terminator robots that venture deep into cancerous tumors where conventional chemotherapy can’t reach.”
No, I don’t have a thing for robots, it’s just coincidental that robot-related items have caught my attention lately, and they make for easy posts. I guess the next [...]

The goal is to create insects that can be remotely controlled to serve as remote sensing devices, giving the paranoid schizophrenic in us all one more excuse to start gibbering about “Project: Beelzebub.”
–Joel Johnson, Cyborg Moths Will Soon Watch You Pee, at Boing Boing Gadgets
Urm, yet another DARPA project.
Not that I’m paranoid, but imagine [...]

BigDog is a quadruped robot being developed by Boston Dynamics (funded by DARPA). You can read more about BigDog at Think Artificial.
BigDog’s behavior is fascinating, eerie, creepy — there’s a certain dissonance, knowing that it’s just a machine, yet its behavior induces that reptile-brain gut feeling that this is a living, very alien, creature. [...]

I want. Please send me a set, lol.
The main focus of this project is to investigate and develop novel principles of adaptation and evolution for symbiotic multi-robot organisms based on bio-inspired approaches and modern computing paradigms. Such robot organisms consist of super-large-scale swarms of robots, which can dock with each other and symbiotically share [...]