Hasta La Gadget!

If only we lived in a world where we could actually have robot-maids like Rosie from The Jetsons, or those creepy butler robots from Sleeper. Okay, so technology has advanced enough to give us Roombas to vacuum our floors for us, but what happens when you’re eating a flaky croissant at your desk at the office and realize you’ve created an ant’s dream? Do you clean it up yourself? 

The answer is no. The Mini Robo Vacuum will be your new robo-BFF. He’ll sit upon your desk, and, with the simple push of a button on top of his tiny head, he’ll clean up all the messes you make. This little robot takes 2 AA batteries to sweep up your debris. The Mini Robo Vacuum comes in red, black, or a rather R2-D2-ish gray.

You can get it now for $20 at Fredflare.com. But, lucky for you, Fredflare is having a holiday preview sale. Enter code “flare” at checkout to receive 30 percent off sitewide. This deal ends on November 15, and cannot be combined with any other offer.

The more that technology advances, the more important it becomes to remind ourselves of its potential pitfalls–I’m speaking, of course, about killer robots. As we push closer to Halloween, it seems like an appropriate time to pay tribute to some of the baddest, meanest, and downright creepiest robots we’ve seen on screen and the front pages of the Technology section.

Here’s the PCMag staff’s nominees for the scariest robots of all time.

Hey friends, you too can make a robot from perfectly ordinary household materials. Have a balloon and some coffee grounds lying around the house? Stick the grounds in the balloon and voila, you’ve got a super awesome, super grippy robot arm.

As for the rest of the robot arm, that’s going to require some serious electronic engineering–and a degree in advanced robotics certainly wouldn’t hurt, but at least you’re half of the way there, right?

The simple machine was devised by a team of robotics types in Chicago and New York. If the video is any indication, the device can pick up just about anything. In just under three minutes, the device picks up a spring, a jack, plastic tubing, a light bulb, an uncooked egg, pours a cup of water, and draws a square with a pen.

The Register explains the mechanics of the coffee and balloon concoction,

The manipulator works by pressing the soft balloon full of loose coffee grounds down on the object to be gripped. Then the air is sucked out of the balloon, causing the coffee granules to press together and lock into a rigid shape – just as they do when vacuum-packed. The object is now securely grasped by the manipulator, and can be released as desired by ending the suction on the granule-filled bulb.

A scientist involved with the project suggests that it “could be on the market tomorrow.” In the meantime, I can watch video of the arm picking up stuff all day long. Check it out in all of its glory, after the jump.

Doctors at the McGill University Health Center in Montreal, Canada have broken new ground in the medical technology field, performing the world’s first wholly robotic surgery last week. Using the DaVinci surgical robot and an anesthesia robot nicknamed McSleepy doctors oversaw the partial removal of a Canadian man’s prostate.

“The DaVinci allows us to work from a workstation operating surgical instruments with delicate movements of our fingers with a precision that cannot be provided by humans alone,” said Dr. Armen Aprikian, MUHC’s urologist in chief, who led the team controlling the DaVinci robot during the surgery. “This should allow for faster, safer and more precise surgery for our patients.”

Though surgeons have been performing robotically assisted surgeries since 1985, the combination of surgical and anesthetic robots, without direct human to patient contact during the operation, is a first.

The McGill University Health Center has performed robotic surgeries in the past, using the DaVinci surgical robot since the summer of 2009. The system uses four mechanical arms, controlled by a surgeon through a nearby console that provides precise controls and high definition 3D images.

More details after the jump…

Face it, some day you, me and everybody else will be working along-side robots. They’re already in our factories and starting to arrive in our homes. Despite everyone’s irrational fear of “our robot overlords,” this is as it should be. The only problem is that robots today are not nearly as smart as we think they are and a powerful manufacturing bot could, without meaning to, take your head off if you get in its way.

No, robots are not trying to harm us, but programming them to understand our emotions, needs and reactions to, say, pain is pretty darn difficult. Over in Slovenia, scientists are seeking to overcome this android deficit by teaching robots how humans react to varying degrees of human-robot collisions. To do so, researchers took a standard Epson manufacturing robot arm and programmed it to “punch” someone’s arm as many as 18 times with dull and then increasingly sharp instruments. Punchees were asked to record the severity of their pain. This ranged from “painless” to “unbearable”.

If our future is literally filled with robots, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to work alongside them without occasionally bumping into each other. As a report in New Scientist explains, the data will be used to program future robots and ensure that they slow down when sensors indicate they’re in the proximity of a human. No word on if the scientist will also program robots that do bump into humans to say, “My bad.”