Humanoid robots are definitely cool, but what about cars that drive themselves? The team at the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) is looking to send a robotic Audi TTS racing off at high speed up the tight bends that lead to Pikes Peak without a driver. The car, nicknamed Shelley, will be attempting a timed race in September. Other autonomous cars have reached the summit before, but only at speeds of around 25mph, the team is looking to do it much faster, and when you take into account Shelley has hit speeds of 130mph without a driver on testing grounds, it’ll certainly be an interesting challenge. The car will stay on track thanks to its use of a differential GPS, which is much more accurate than a standard GPS, allowing you to pinpoint the car’s position to within an inch. Aside from the GPS unit, Shelley can measure her speed and acceleration thanks to the wheel-speed sensors and accelerometer, and getting her bearings from gyroscopes. This will all be controlled by the bunch of electronics and gadgets that are crammed into the vehicle’s trunk. Will we all have self-driving cars to chauffer us around town in the future? It certainly seems like an appealing idea.

Now here is one of the more unique robot projects out there from the folks at the Tsumaki Telerobotics Laboratory (Yamagata University) who have devised a Wearable Robot. Known as the Telecommunicator T1, this experimental model aims to offer gestural presence that you do not obtain from a cellphone conversation as it sits on your shoulder. The robot will remain connected to the Internet, where you can control where it looks simply by tilting your head. Apart from that, arm gestures including waving are also possible, although the current hardware restricts it movement by a fair bit. Whatever the robot looks at will be transmitted to you through a pair of goggles, while you can also hold Face-to-Robot conversations. No idea on where the project is at the moment, but it would be interesting to see a commercial version released.

PFU Systems' latest prototype dual display kiosk is pretty special, considering it relies on face recognition technology that is capable of delivering a more personalized advertising experience. The top screen on the kiosk will show off a rather dorky looking animated face courtesy of Big Towns, a specialist in computer graphics, whereas the bottom touchscreen display functions as an interface instead for you to navigate through. Omron’s software that is loaded within is capable of determining one's gender (no idea how it does that - what happens when one looks androgynous?) while giving an approximate age reading (women, stay alert!). With such details in hand, it will then pull out the more appropriate advertisements for your viewing pleasure.

This is probably just what you need during the next World Cup finals. This robot, aptly called the Heineken Bot, was created by the folks over at Middlesex University, and displayed at the Kinetica Art Fair in London. It’ll steadily make its rounds along a preprogrammed path, and all you have to do is hover your hand above its sonar-sensing head, pop a cup into its holder and you’ll be rewarded with a nice drink, perfect to see your country win the World Cup. Maybe if they mass produced this before the World Cup, it’d turn into a nice and healthy business.

With the recent earthquake in Haiti, the importance of earthquake detectors has been highlighted again. Now a group of students from the JT Engineering College in Gujarat, India, have come up with a robot that can sense earthquakes, and it apparently does so a good three hours before the earthquake. Of course, three hours isn’t a lot of time, but when you’re talking about a natural disaster, three hours will certainly save a lot of lives. This robot has two transmitters whose circuits are kept inside the earth to sense changes in temperature and water levels, as well as transmit the information about the changes via microwave frequencies. It uses microcontrollers to sense vibrations and will give off an alarm upon detection. Of course, the question remains why this device needed to be built into a robot form factor, but robots are cool, so nobody’s going to complain, right? Check out a video of it if you’re into robots.

Hobbyist BloodKeith from China came up with this pair of magnificent miniature robotic hands which will be part of his line of upcoming TK humanoid robots, where he is toying with the idea of selling his creation sometime in the future. These hands are able to grasp cylindrical objects, and hopefully can tell the object it is holding since carrying around an egg requires a whole lot less energy and pressure compared to toting a mug of beer around. Each finger measures 7cm in length, and we wonder whether it is fast enough to capture and crush a fly in mid-flight. Could these also be a murder weapon of choice in the future?

MkMan has come up with the rather delectable Lego spider robot, where it was created using pieces from a Mindstorm kit alongside a bunch of milled plastic parts. The legs themselves are provided by a locomotive concept known as Klann Linkage, where they will operate in twos, converting the rotational force from one motor into movement for both legs. There are four rotating gears in total to keep all eight legs moving. As for each limb, they are made up of five pieces including a base for each pair. Hopefully your mom won't swat this out of fear when she stumbles upon it.

Robot technology is certainly getting better and better, and NASA doesn’t want to be left out of the party. NASA and GM have developed a rather impressive new crew member – Robonaut 2. The Robonaut 2 (R2) is the next iteration of the Robonaut, and can work much better alongside humans. It’s ambidextrous and can use the same tools as humans, not to mention lift up to 20lbs, making it a rather useful robot to be deployed into environments that are too dangerous for humans to work in. We’re looking forward to the day where we can have robots are cool as this serving us our morning coffee, which is a rather interesting way of defining “working alongside humans”.

DARPA has kicked off a robotics software/hardware research and development program known as ARM, where it hopes to construct a robot which is capable of grasping a number of objects using two arms and hands autonomously and skillfully, making us wonder whether DARPA is really Skynet in disguise. This is to help it hold objects such as knives and pistols, and according to the brief, the new robot hand and control software ought to have the capability to “hold an inert grenade with one hand, and pull the pin with the other hand” without required a human to guide or control it in any way. Could terminators be the future of the army?

ChiMERA (Chemically Induced Motion Everting Robotic Amoeba - interesting acronym, that) is one robot that has no wings, but instead is a type of slippery water-loving serpent that features a flexible silicone skin with water or gel within. ChiMERA is able to zip along rather speedily at 0.5 m/s, and can modify its body structure to squeeze through small holes measuring half its own diameter. Looks like the perfect spy device for government organizations and agencies if this comes with a built-in camera. We here at Ubergizmo would pay closer attention to the toilet bowl the next time we relieve ourselves, lest one of these puppies actually sneak up on us unwittingly.

Future Robotics Technology Center (aka fuRo) has come up with a nifty master-slave controller known as WIND (Wireless Intelligent Networked Device). WIND consists of a bunch of tiny System-on-Chip processors and 3D position sensors which are mounted to a vest that senses your body’s movements. All corresponding movements will be translated into commands for a robot wirelessly thanks to a Bluetooth connection, which means you are limited to a range of just 10 meters. A robotic avatar, so to speak, but it doesn't look as though such technology will make its way to the mainstream market anytime soon. Even so, the average man on the street will probably prefer to spend his money elsewhere instead of such an indulgence.

If you happen to suffer from ophidiophobia (an unnatural fear of snakes), then you might want to wean yourself off this fear with the Omnitread snake robot - don't worry, this one is non-venomous and will most probably only hurt your wallet if you want one. It comes in two sizes - 4" and 8", and wouldn't seem threatening to anyone at all. The 4" model tips the scales at around 9 pounds, and can lift half its body above the ground with ease. Apart from that, this robot can expand and stretch its seven segments as and when required, but don't worry about it shedding as it will only rust instead.

The PALRO robot (pal and robot thrown in together) from Fuji Soft looks pretty cool - after all, it will merge both Fuji Soft's software capabilities with an open architecture that offers developers a whole lot of room to play with. PALRO is a mere 15" tall, tipping the scales at an extremely lightweight 1.9kg. Interesting enough, he won't cost a bomb at $3.300, featuring a built-in camera, microphones, speakers, an LED array with an Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor running the proceedings from within. When compared to Vstone’s Robovie-PC which is $1,100 more expensive and misses out on a fancy exoskeleton, the PALRO certainly seems like more than a decent bargain.

Robots used to look cool and all, just look at robots like Robocop, Transformers and whatever. Now it seems the trend is to build robots that look creepy, rather than cool and robot-like. The folks over at Advanced Robotic Systems Laboratories (ARSL) are busy showing off their new Proto-2 robot, and it’s just as creepy as the robots that most people are coming up with nowadays. It is designed partly to aid in the study of human-robot interaction, and thus packs an expressive face, complete with moving eyebrows and a (more) natural walking gait, thanks to a new dynamic toe-joint that they developed. If this trend keeps up, we’re going to have to ask the folks we meet by the roadside in the future if they’re robots.