Wired reports that researchers have built a baseball-playing robot learns more about the game as it plays. In other words, it will miss the first few pitches, but it will slowly learn where the ball is most likely to come from. After a while, it will start to hit more pitches and become more proficient in baseball.

The robot is able to quickly learn baseball thanks to its new brain that emulates a brain with about 100,000 neurons. According to Wikipedia, the fruit fly and lobster both have about 100,000 neurons in their brains. In comparison, the human brain has about 85 billion.

It may not have as many neurons as a human, but the researchers hope this latest robot can help them produce more complicated brains in the future. The end goal is to have robots perform complicated tasks that only humans and advanced animals, like apes, dolphins and elephants, can perform.

[Image: Wired]

Of course, if there’s anything we can count on humanity to do, it’s sexualize things. And naturally (unnaturally?), the evolution of androids means that eventually, people are going to start having sex with robots. Duh.

It’s not like this isn’t already happening, but the future could open up so many more opportunities for robot sexy times. The Huffington Post and YouGov recently conducted a poll about Americans’ attitudes toward the future of robots, and our interactions with them.

And the results concerning sex robots tip my bullshit meter all the way to maximum bullshittery.

When asked if they would use a sex robot for its (his/her’s?) designed purpose, only 9% said yes. Nine. As in less than one in ten. Ok, sure.

18% said that they think sex robots will be available by 2030.

Last year, a New Zealand study published in Futures magazine painted an interesting picture of the pay-for-sex world in the next few decades. Researchers envision a version of Amsterdam’s red light district that’s completely run by android prostitutes by the year 2050.

“[They] are clean of sexual transmitted infections (STIs), not smuggled in from Eastern Europe and forced into slavery, the city council will have direct control over android sex workers controlling prices, hours of operations and sexual services,” they said.

These sex robots could be fully customizable and offer a wider variant of body type, ethnicity, age, language, and various sexual features. In their future, it’s goodbye sex trade and hello clean, safe, sex robots.

And there’s obviously no emotional toll to be taken on sex robots, that is of course until they become sentient. But we don’t have to worry about that for at least a few hundred years. Probably.

HuffPost’s poll also asked about whether or not sex with a sexbot is considered cheating. 42% said that it would be. And the younger the respondent, the more likely they were to say it’s not cheating.

Good lord, I’m calling it a “he.” It’s begun.

Well, now they’ve put him it in a chemical protection suit. Watch this video and tell me you could know, for a fact, that it’s a robot under there and not a human in a hazmat suit.

[Boston Dynamics via Engadget]

Dr. Roderich Gross, Head of the Natural Robotics Lab at the University of Sheffield, and his team have created 40 robots that can work together through the use of advanced artificial intelligence. The robots are programmed to meet up and work towards a common goal, even if they’re initially separated. For now, the robots can only perform basic functions, like moving a box, but the hope is that they can one day used in military, medical and science applications.

Check out the video below to see the robot swarm in action:

What’s interesting is that these robots may one day be shrunk down to the microscopic level and be inserted into the human body. The robots would then work together to improve functions of the body. Of course, the hard part would be convincing humans to let doctors inject hundreds of tiny robots into their bloodstream.

[h/t: Telegraph]

Virginia Tech College of Engineering researchers have unveiled a life-like, autonomous robotic jellyfish the size and weight of a grown man, 5 foot 7 inches in length and weighing 170 pounds, as part of a U.S. Navy-funded project.

The prototype robot, nicknamed Cyro, is a larger model of a robotic jellyfish the same team – headed by Shashank Priya of Blacksburg, Va., and professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech – unveiled in 2012. The earlier robot, dubbed RoboJelly, is roughly the size of a man’s hand, and typical of jellyfish found along beaches.

Virginia Tech: Autonomous Robotic Jellyfish from virginiatech on Vimeo.

I don’t particularly like jellyfish, but this robot looks harmless enough. I doubt it will turn into a nightmare machine like other animal-based robots. Still, the potential is there – the robotic uprising could see these robots being upgraded to man o’ wars.

The Biorobotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University has been hard at work on what they call a modular snake robot. Why would they create such a thing? Here’s how they explain it:

Snake robots can use their many internal degrees of freedom to thread through tightly packed volumes accessing locations that people and machinery otherwise cannot use. Moreover, these highly articulated devices can coordinate their internal degrees of freedom to perform a variety of locomotion capabilities that go beyond the capabilities of conventional wheeled and the recently developed legged robots. The true power of these devices is that they are versatile, achieving behaviors not limited to crawling, climbing, and swimming.

That actually sounds pretty useful. I’m sure a number of industries, including defense, could do some pretty amazing things with a robot that can move in and out of tight spaces. So why is this particularly robot so terrifying? Just watch this:

As you can see, our robot snake friend here can immediately constrict around a object after being thrown at it. Sure, it looks cool at first, until you realize that somebody (or some robot) may one day throw this thing at your neck. It’s hard enough already to fight off a Boa Constrictor. Just imagine how hard it would be to fight off a robot snake whose sole directive is snuffing out the life you hold dear.

[h/t: Wired]

Meet Bartendro, a “cocktail dispensing robot” from the folks at Party Robotics. The machine is being billed as the ultimate drink maker as it can easily and quickly make any drink you can think of. It’s extremely portable and easily programmable so you can serve any kind of drink at any party.

Bartendro will become a reality if it’s able to raise $135,000 on Kickstarter in the next 26 days. The project already has 124 backers pledging $37,008, but it’s gonna need a lot more support before our robotic alcohol overlords become a reality.

So, how much is this thing going to cost? The base Bartendro, called the Shotbot, comes with a single dispenser and costs $249. Things get a bit more expensive as you move to more custom built dispensers. The Bartendro 3 will cost $499, the Bartendro 7 costs $1,199 and the Bartendro 15 goes for $2,499.

The most exciting part about this project, however, is Party Robotics plans to build a drink database. The team is collecting recipes from all over the world so that Bartendro can perfectly create any drink. It would be a huge help for those of us who are terrible at following drink recipes. I always unwittingly add too much alcohol, thus overpowering any semblance of sweetness found in the drink. The $499 asking price might be worth it if it means I never have to waste any more alcohol on botched recipe experiments.

[h/t: CNET]

They wouldn’t make a robot that could kill us with giant concrete blocks:

Holy sh*t, did you see that? Remind me never to face off against BigDog in a construction yard.

[h/t: Reddit]

Brown University explains:

The robot, which mimics the wing shape and motion of the lesser dog-faced fruit bat, is designed to flap while attached to a force transducer in a wind tunnel. As the lifelike wing flaps, the force transducer records the aerodynamic forces generated by the moving wing. By measuring the power output of the three servo motors that control the robot’s seven movable joints, researchers can evaluate the energy required to execute wing movements.

Testing showed the robot can match the basic flight parameters of bats, producing enough thrust to overcome drag and enough lift to carry the weight of the model species.

Hat tip to LiveScience

Robohub reports that the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zurich have created Cubli, a robotic cube that can walk, jump and balance on its corners. The most amazing part is that the cube is built out of nothing but off-the-shelf motors, batteries and electronic components.

You can see Cubli below balancing on its corner through the use of spinning flywheels that maintain its balance, even when slightly nudged:

So, what’s next for the Cubli? The researchers are already working on a version of Cubli that can walk on flat surfaces, or jump. It can already do these things, but it was found that some internal components were damaged when it jumps. These flaws have been mostly fixed, and now the team is working on “controlled maneuvers of jumping up, balancing, and falling over to make the Cubli walk across a surface.”

[h/t: Gizmodo]