http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjAoBKagWQA

Oh and there’s a theme – music videos. Robots in music videos. Yeah, that’ll do. Robots in Music Videos week.

First up is Beastie Boys – Intergalactic. An excellent robot with a forever awesome song.

BloodKeith, a robot hobbyist from China, has designed and built himself some pretty sweet robotic hands. The hands themselves have 7cm long fingers, with 5cm for the thumbs, and the fingers are simultaneously controlled by a single servo. The videos on his blog show the hands grasping various objects and opening/closing at different speeds. The first two videos that demonstrate speed are particularly creepy and, at 3am, concerned me greatly. The hands also remind me of the Terminator hand in Terminator 2, but made out of Lego.

BloodKeith’s blog [translated] via Plastic Pals

Muscle Jaw, om nom nom

I spotted these really cool papercraft robots on some dude’s livejournal and had to find out a little more, mainly as to why they sound like they might be a painful case of groin growths. There’s some info over at the Paperoid website – such as all the different robots available, what their skillsets are – in classic not-quite-there translation from Japanese to English. There’s even an untranslatable comic about the Paperoids available, which I highly recommend if you like to be confused beyond confusion itself whilst looking at trance-inducing colours. The models themselves are cunningly crafted into a handful of coloured tubes, that once cut and bent as directed turn into the mighty little paper robots.

You can grab some of the characters in the UK from twentytwentyone, here is Muscle Jaw, you can find others using searching prowess.

NASA and GM have combined forces to advance crappy Robonaut 1 (with his Star Warsesque head and his creepy fake muscles) into the sleek killing machine that is Robonaut 2, or R2 as he is known to his friends. Did I say killing machine? I meant humanoid telepresence-based space hero, so easy to get those mixed up.

R2 will be able to use the same tools humans use, things like hammers, staplers, sellotape, a bow and arrow, wiimotes, sticks of dynamite, spoons, lego, window spray, frying pans and, of course, big and dangerous guns. Probably with lasers and tiny rockets that make you go all dead. But that doesn’t matter as R2 will be floating above the world in the spaceosphere, hooray! Except that he will also be on Earth, forced to work in GM’s factories making sure people don’t get pwnd by those reckless and emotionless robotic arms. I’m not suggesting R2 might be dangerous or anything, but have you seen those lasers coming out of R2′s knuckles? My suspicion is suitably piqued.

R2 looks pretty cool too, what with its big shiny head. Rather like Master Chief from the ever popular youth video arcade game ‘Halo 3: Killing Stuff Lolz’. Go on, check out the likeness here. Okay, that was just a funny picture I found, real likeness here.

Okay, I am going to leave you with one more video before I go and hide, fearing that R2 has read this and is looking out for me. This is why we must fear. Meet Boba Fett Robonaut 1 (and Robonaut 1 doesn’t even have any friends to call him R1 either).

Robonaut 2 via Engadget via BotJunkie