Play-i's Bo: A Charming and Loveable Tiny Robot

When we last met Play-i’s charming robots Bo and Yana they were busy pounding out tunes on a little colorful Xylophone and raising $1.4 million in crowdfunding cash. Now, however, they’re very nearly ready to ship and are doing some really impressive things that will help kids learn programming while having fun.

You can think of Play-i’s toys as sort of like the simple programming language, Logo, in physical form. You can program the robots using your iOS device and there are a series of introductory games that teach you the rudiments of programming including functions, subroutines, and loops. For example, the app asks you to play certain notes on the xylophone using Bo’s robotic arm – say five blue notes and five pink ones. To do this you must program the robot to hammer down five times, move over a few spaces, and hammer down five more times.

You can also add accessories to the robots and create, say, a platform for your LEGO creations or a mobile spy platform. While I’m always very skeptical of tech toys – they end up in the junk box far too soon and are often far too expensive – I’m impressed with how far the team has come in just a few short weeks. It looks like the product will soon be ready to ship and we will all have weird, blue robots running around our house busily hammering out jaunty tunes on our pets.

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NASA's next robot rover squishes like a child's toy

In order to land on the Martian surface, NASA's Mars Rover Curiosity went through seven minutes of terror : it plummeted from the sky at 13,000 miles per hour, with only a supersonic parachute and a set of rocket motors to keep it from becoming a crater. However, a team at NASA has a nifty trick up its sleeves for the next time around: a rover made of hollow rods and elastic cable that can squish and bounce. Just like the Skwish, a popular child's toy developed in the early '80s, NASA's Super Ball Bot uses the principles of tensegrity to do its job. The contraption can absorb the impact of a hard landing, pop right back up, then roll across a surface, end over end, like an extremely awkward ball.

While NASA scientists are still proving that the concept works and figuring out the best way to control it as it rolls, they currently believe they could hang a payload inside the contraption and drop it onto a planet with little damage at all. They've already successfully dropped an egg from 10 meters, and have calculated that such a rover could land on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, with no protection other than the thick atmosphere itself. Perhaps our next extraterrestrial landing will be a little less terrifying as a result.

Source: NASA

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3D-Printed Wearable Iron Man Mark III Suit Sells For $35,000.

Cheap Iron Man Mark III suits don’t rally pack an authentic punch for avid cosplay fans, which is where this fully wearable 3D-printed suit comes into play. If you can fork over $2,000 (if you wait 8 months or $35,000 if you want it in 4 months) you can order one of these suits that are fully wearable and made to fit anyone as tall as 5′ 5″ to 6′ 1″. Made by Iron Man Factory (seriously), the suit also features sensor-controlled motors that are powered by AAA batteries that activate “thrusters” that are on the back and will slide open the helmet.
The suit weighs 7 pounds and is made from a carbon fiber polymer. But don’t worry, the inside is supposed to be quite comfortable with its cushioned inter that also contains an LED lighting system (lasers not included). If you’re drooling over one right now, you better round up all your rich buddies because Iron Man Facotry needs to fulfill 5,000 pre-orders of the suit before it can even go into production (which takes 8 months).

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Google Buys Spectacular Robot Maker, Boston Dynamics

Google has acquired robotics engineering company Boston Dynamics , best known for its line of quadrupeds with funny gaits and often mind-blowing capabilities. Products that the firm has demonstrated in recent years include BigDog, a motorized robot that can handle ice and snow, the 29 mile-per-hour Cheetah , and an eerily convincing humanoid known as PETMAN. News of the deal was reported on Friday by The New York Times , which says that the Massachusetts-based company's role in future Google projects is currently unclear.
Specific details about the price and terms of the deal are currently unknown, though Google told the NYT that existing contracts — including a $10.8 million contract inked earlier this year with the US Defense Agency Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — would be honored. Google also says it doesn't plan to become a military contractor as a result of the acquisition.
Boston Dynamics began as a spinoff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992, and quickly started working on projects for the military. Besides BigDog, that includes Cheetah, an animal-like robot developed to run at high speeds, which was followed up by a more versatile model called WildCat. It's also worked on Atlas, a humanoid robot designed to work outdoors.
In a tweet, Google's Andy Rubin — who formerly ran Google's Android division — said the "future is looking awesome."

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