Hasta La Gadget!

It’s not as easy as it once was to carve our a living for oneself battling giant space aliens. It’s always a good idea to have a plan B. Take this Ultraman-esque Chinese robot, who’s now employed full time as a noodle chef.

It might not be the fastest race in the world, but after more than two days of running, at least the competitors are determined. As we reported on Thursday, bipedal robots competed in a marathon (all 26.2 miles of it) in Osaka, Japan. Now, 54 hours and 57 minutes into the race, we finally have a winner after a surprisingly heated competition in the last few laps. Robovie-PC, constructed by Vstone, the Japanese robotics company that organized the Robo Mara Full, managed to finish first after 422 laps of the 100-meter track.

With only a few laps to go, Robovie-PC Lite, made by the same corporation as the winning Robovie-PC, froze up after establishing a commanding lead. It was only in the the last moments of the race that Robovie-PC was able to pass the temporarily disabled machine and seize the first-place position. Soon after, Robovie-PC Lite managed to work itself back onto the track and make up a good deal of the lost time, finishing only a second behind its robotic brother.

These little guys won’t be replacing human runners anytime soon, with an average speed of just under one half of a mile per hour, but organizers say the electrically-charged winners have demonstrated their prowess in durability and maneuverability over a very challenging exercise. 

[via PhysOrg, The Guardian]

Toy Fair 2011 isn’t quite as big a deal as say, CES or MWC, but it still has its fair share of nifty plaything gadgets. One jewel of the show is Sega’s Wappy Dog toy that interfaces with Activision’s Nintendo DS title of the same name. In what amounts to the logical evolutionary conclusion of the artist formerly known as Tamagotchi, Wappy Dog allows folks to communicate with their digital pets not only via the DS, but also by playing with and training their pooch’s robotic doppelgänger. After playing with DS Wappy, the game automatically syncs up with the toy bot to keep it from developing multiple personality disorder. Though currently a prototype, the toy can dance (hopefully with a little more flava than its iDog cousin), whine, and bark in response to your child’s interactions, and is slated for a release this fall at an unknown price point. No need to thank us for finding your next family pet.

Activision and Sega show off Wappy Dog dogbot / Nintendo DS game at Toy Fair 2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Feb 2011 19:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If Watson’s massive win over the human race in Jeopardy! was a little too close to the robo-pocalypse for you, here’s a decidedly less confrontational artificial intelligence. Japan is considering sending a humanoid robot companion up to the International Space Station that would not only talk with the astronauts, but also to people on Earth using Twitter. According to an article on Space.com, the robot would have facial expressions that mimic a human being and serve as both a companion to the astronauts and a monitor for the space station. An engineer from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said this artificial being would be “very human-like” and would monitor stress levels and other health indicators. Unlike other Twitter bots, this one might actually be worth following as it will also be responsible for taking photos and tweeting them back down to Earth.

NASA’s humanoid Robonaut 2 is already slated to join the ISS crew on Thursday with the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery, according to the robot’s Twitter account. NASA’s android is designed to help astronauts with things like cleaning, not to provide companionship and comfort like the one planned by JAXA. Similar to the Japanese robot, Robonaut 2 will be using Twitter from Earth’s orbit.

Japan is known for leading the way in humanoid robotics, so it should be interesting to see what the country’s space agency cooks up for the ISS astronauts. Hopefully something with a little less alarming facial expressions than this one.

[via Space.com]