What's Behind Japan's Love Affair with Robots?

'Miimu,' a HRP-4C robot, models a wedding dress by Japanese designer Yumi Katsura at Katsura's 2009 Paris Grand Collection in Osaka, Japan, on July 22, 2009. Junji Kurokawa / AP

From Time Magazine:

If Japanese engineers had their way, we might soon be cheering on a robotic World Series. Every year or two, Japanese researchers roll out a new robotic invention — the latest to grab headlines earlier this month was a mechanized baseball duo of a batter and pitcher that can throw 90% of its pitches in the strike zone. And while the majority of Japanese robotic inventions — from the dazzling to the horrifying —have largely been unable to break into the mass market, Japanese scientists aren't likely to short-circuit their robotic ambitions anytime soon: Robotic technology plays a larger role in Japan than anywhere else in the world.

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From Sand To Silicon: the Making Of A Chip

From Intel:

Illustrations - Making of a Chip

View this graphic presentation offering a high-level demonstration of the process for manufacturing a central processing unit (CPU), which operates in every PC today. Here you can catch a glimpse of some of the amazingly sophisticated work going on daily inside Intel's cutting-edge silicon manufacturing fabs.

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Does Baseball's Future Lie In These Cold, Robotic Hands?

From Popular Science:

A robot pitcher faces off against a robot batter.

Right now the next baseball great may be warming up, not on a Little League diamond, but in a lab. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have pitted a robotic pitcher against a robotic batter to show that the robots can respond to each other at high speeds.

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Want Responsible Robotics? Start With Responsible Humans

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 31, 2009) — When the legendary science fiction writer Isaac Asimov penned the "Three Laws of Responsible Robotics," he forever changed the way humans think about artificial intelligence, and inspired generations of engineers to take up robotics.

In the current issue of journal IEEE Intelligent Systems, two engineers propose alternative laws to rewrite our future with robots.

The future they foresee is at once safer, and more realistic.

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At Secret Conference, Scientists Consider the Possible Rise of Autonomous Killer Robots

Faster, Robot! Kill! Kill!

From Popular Science:

The long-awaited robot-led holocaust may happen any day now. That seems to be the finding of a secret conference of the world's top computer scientists, roboticists, and artificial intelligence researchers. The clandestine meeting focused on topics surrounding advancements in robotics and how they could quickly spiral out of human control. This includes the danger that robots could autonomously kill humans -- a danger than conference participants believe may already exist.

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Japanese Invent Giant Soccer-Playing Robot

Soccer-playing robot in Japan @ Yahoo!7 Video

From Popular Science:

Soccer players are a weird bunch. Some cover themselves in Elvish tattoos, while others claim to have problems telling men and women apart. Hajime 33 is no exception to the trend, what with him being a giant robot and all.

So far, this robot doesn't look like it's going to be starting for Barca any time soon, and creator Hajime Sakamoto said he struggled to get the robot simply to stand up without falling over. However, Hajime 33 does serve as a proof of concept that humanoid robots can be both tall and active. By comparison, Asimo, Honda's famously agile humanoid robot, only stands about four feet tall. And some soccerbots are quite a bit smaller

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iCub, The Open-Source Robot Child

From Popsci.com:

It takes a village to raise a robot. At least, that's the belief of the creators of iCub, a humanoid robot the size of a 3-1/2-year-old child, who are making its development entirely open-domain.

The iCub is the brainchild of a group of European universities led by the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa, who have been charged by the European Commission to develop a functioning humanoid child. They developed a 2-1/2-foot-tall, 70-pound robot child with 53 mechanical joints that allow it to move its head, neck, arms, fingers, eyes and legs. It can also feel with its fingertips, grip with its hands, and listen.

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