Eythor Bender of Berkeley Bionics brings onstage two amazing exoskeletons, HULC and eLEGS — robotic add-ons that could one day allow a human to carry 200 pounds without tiring, or allow a wheelchair user to stand and walk. It’s a powerful onstage demo, with implications for human potential of all kinds.

Affetto the toddler robot does not get you the tax break but you can probably teach it to get your beer from the fridge a lot easier than a real toddler. Affetto is modeled after a one- to two-year-old child and will be used to study the early stages of human social development. There have…

As a grad student, Cynthia Breazeal wondered why we were using robots on Mars, but not in our living rooms. The key, she realized: training robots to interact with people. Now she dreams up and builds robots that teach, learn — and play. Watch for amazing demo footage of a new interactive game for kids.

Much more here.

Wait, wait, that’s no way to treat a robot!

First they make a robot that seems, though they deny this, like it will feed on humans. Then they make a robot that runs like a human. What will they think of next? And who are they, anyway?

The A-Pod Robot

Well, not really dreams. More like, Robots taking over the world because they don’t need humans any more to figure stuff out for them. This is not entirely new … we’ve heard some news of this before. What concerns me, of course, is that once the robots can think for themselves … well, you know…

Any time now …. The Singularity Approachith. From the same people who gave you the “I don’t like it when you touch me that way” robot, we have this: Click on the picture. Also, notice that you can get 3.14 bucks off a subscription to Seed because it’s Pi Day! Listen to me. When the…

What would Klatu do? Hat tip: Geekology

It jumps. It rolls. It could be coming soon to a planet near you. Designed by biomimetics researcher Rhodri Armour at the University of Bath, the Jollbot is a spherical cage that can roll in any direction. If it can’t go around an obstacle, it goes over. To jump, the cage compresses and springs open…

A robot controlled by a blob of rat brain cells could provide insights into diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Created at the University of Reading, the project marries 300,000 rat neurons to a robot that navigates via sonar. The neurons are now being taught to steer the robot around obstacles and avoid the walls of the…

It gets really interesting just after 1 min. 30 sec.

[hat tip: Geekologie]

Zooillogiz has a must read post on robotic jellyfish. Here’s the video, but you must go read the post (and see another video) as well. Cool. But wait, there’s more…

We’re not sure what brand of batteries it was using, but the Cornell Ranger robot just kept going and going April 3 when it set an unofficial world record by walking nonstop for 45 laps — a little over 9 kilometers or 5.6 miles — around the Barton Hall running track. Developed by a team…

The Robots have been very quiet lately, have you noticed? This is probably because they have been chagrined by recent events only now being made public. Kevin Fahey, US Army program executive officer for ground forces … said there had been chilling incidents in which the [Combat Robots] had … attempted to train … 5.56mm…

Hat Tip: Zooillogix

New Robot Gets Eyes, Tools in Spacewalk from PhysOrg.com (AP) — Now that the space station’s new robot is fully assembled, astronauts prepared to attach the giant machine directly to the orbiting outpost for the first time on Tuesday. [...]