A research group at Osaka University is developing a robot hand for tele-handshaking. It communicates a person's grip force, body temperature, and touch. "In ordinary video-conferencing systems, it's difficult even to see life-sized pictures of other people. But by attaching this robot hand, you can shake hands with people at a distance. Shaking hands like this gives a greater sense of other people's presence than you get with regular video-conferencing systems." Results from preliminary trials showed that to reproduce a real person's hand, the three most important aspects were texture, temperature and a sufficient grip force. Here, silicone rubber and sponge are used to simulate the elasticity of human skin and the underlying muscle structure, with an appropriate temperature achieved through the use of a film heater...

Boston Dynamics and DARPA have just released video of their prototype "Cheetah" robot galloping at 18 mph (nearly 30 kph), setting a new land speed record for legged robots. Boston Dynamics isn't calling this robot "Cheetah" just for fun: the bot's movements are all bio-inspired, patterned directly after fast-moving animals in nature like real cheetahs, horses, and even dogs. For example, you'll notice how the robot doesn't just rely on its legs, but also flexes its back with each stride, which is the same way that quadrupedal animals work.

This tiny stand-alone robot provides an open-source platform for digital fabrication, on a small scale. Piccolo is powered by an Arduino board, and supports movement along X, Y or Z axes. Simply attach a pen, pencil, brush or possibly even an X-Acto knife as its drawing medium. Piccolo can then access uploaded libraries which allow it to create drawings. Multiple small ‘bots can even be synchronized together to create larger illustrations or paintings.

Kevin] undertook a robot build partly for his own enjoyment, but also to include his kids in the action. He acquired a cheap toy and packed it full of programmable goodness. The starting point was a $15 toy called Rad 2.0. It’s a great starting point as it already included some motorized parts, and takes care of much of the mechanical issues like joints and structure.

This week's TED2012 conference isn't all talk -- sometimes the videos features speak for themselves. Check out this phenomenal one from the University of Pennsylvania starring a number of nano quadrotors playing the James Bond theme by banging percussion, hitting the piano and strumming a guitar. The room in the video has infrared lights and cameras and the 'copters are outfitted with reflectors, making it possible to plot their position. The result is technical wizardry worthy of Q himself. Check it out after the break.

The Robot American Football initiative started seven years ago when FSI, a major Japanese software and systems developer, was looking for ways to re-energize the popular Robot Sumo competitions. By adapting some of the same technology, including powerful motors, battery packs, R/C control systems, and rugged design, they created what has turned out to be one of the fastest action robot competitions.

It sounds a little creepy, evoking images of unwitting fish following a robotic swimmer just like Picard was drawn into the Borg Collective. But the experiment has a warm and fuzzy heart — to understand why and how fish operate in schools to potentially guide them away from environmental disasters or hazards in the wild.

The test involved a robot fish designed to look like a Notemigonus crysoleucas, a species of Golden shiner. A key difference in this recent research over previous studies of fish interactions with fish-like replicas was the addition of movement for the first time in the robot fish. The robot fish had the general (though larger) shape and tail movement of the Golden shiner.

The robot fish was then dropped in a water tunnel with live Golden shiner fish and intriguingly, the smaller live fish followed behind the robot's wake in streaming water. When scientists turned off the tail movement of the robot fish the live fish appeared more defensive and dropped the schooling action quickly.

So at least in the Golden shiner fish movement and a similar body shape seem to be key in getting live fish to interact normally with robot counterparts as school would in the wild.