Nope, we are still not done with our coverage of ICRA, the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, but we'll take a little bit of a break today to bring you a comprehensive Video Friday, featuring robots learning to do things like humans, and humans learning to do things with robots.

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The thing (well, one of the things) we love about robots is that they can be designed to do things that humans can't. It's not just that they can do human-y things better—it's that they can take a piece of our selves (like fingers) and improve on them to enable totally new capabilities. Osaka University's Omni-Finger is just such a robot, giving artificial fingers an entirely new dimension.

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Ever wondered what it would look like if a robot grabbed you by the face?

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Last year, we were introduced to Lingodroids, which are small robots capable of developing their own language. This isn't a computer language, but more of a human language, with words that we humans could speak if we wanted to. These words have been invented by the robots themselves, using a variety of games to establish correlations between specific words and places, directions, and distances. And last week, Scott Heath from the University of Queensland in Australia presented a new paper on how the Lingodroids have been teaching themselves brand new words for different lengths of time.

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Last year, we told you how Robonaut's dexterous hands rely on tendon-driven fingers to grasp objects much like our own hands do. Now we're going to show you how Robonaut's arms work. You probably noticed that the robot has a perfectly toned upper body with brawny biceps and six-pack abs. But if you're working alongside this burly bot (hello ISS crew!), fear not: Robonaut has fully compliant arms and even a built-in emergency shut-down mechanism. And as our video below shows, he's also one cool, fist-bumping robot.

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We're used to thinking of robots as mechanical entities, but at very small scales, it sometimes becomes easier to use existing structures (like microorganisms that respond to magnetic fields or even swarms of bacteria) instead of trying to design and construct one (or lots) of teeny tiny artificial machines. Aaron Ohta's lab at the University of Hawaii at Manoa has come up with a novel new way of creating non-mechanical microbots quite literally out of thin air, using robots made of bubbles with engines made of lasers.

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Willow Garage introduced the TurtleBot in April of 2011 as a low-cost personal robot kit running open-source software. A year later, it's been an incredible success with researchers and hobbyists, and it's time to meet the next generation platform. Fans of the original TurtleBot needn't worry: TurtleBot 2 is intended to be just like the TurtleBot you already know (mostly) and love (when it works), except with a brand new full-featured base and a sinister flat-black color scheme.

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If you couldn't make it to ICRA this year, don't worry: We'll bring ICRA to you. The 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation attracted more than 1,700 people to the River Centre convention center in St. Paul, Minn., last week. We've been keeping you informed about the coolest (and the weirdest) projects presented at the conference, and we still have many more stories to come. But today we want to take you to ICRA's show floor, where over two dozen exhibitors demoed their robotic creations. Check out our video montage after the break.

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You didn’t think that just because we’re going all-out covering ICRA that we’d let any other cool robot news slip past us this week, did you? Of course you didn’t! There are many more awesome ICRA articles in the works for next week, but in the mean time, here are two robot vids that weren’t at the conference, plus several more that definitely should have been.

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Humans are generalists. We’re adaptable. If there’s a task we can’t do on our own, we find ourselves a tool to help us. Robots aren’t usually like this, because it’s very hard to design a robot that implements all the different tools that might conceivably be useful to it. Roboticists at ETH Zurich are trying to get around this problem by designing a robot with just one tool, but the tool they’ve chosen is a hot glue gun that their robot can use to manufacture any other tools that it needs to.

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