The robots started out hunting for an object designated “food” as a group, and if one discovered the food object before the others, it signalled its fellows with a blue light. But researchers, those meddling fools that will bring about the downfall of civilisation, mixed and matched the food-finding software of the best hunters, and then gave these super-hunters the ability to signal or not signal to the rest of the group at will.

We might expect these super-hunters to merely neglect to signal the group when food is found, to keep it all to themselves, but they’re far more clever than we thought: They actually sent out false signals to lure the other robots away from food. This is the beginning of the end, people. [BotJunkie]

Developed by the University of Tokyo, two baseball robots, a pitcher and a batter, play head to head in near perfection.

The pitching robot uses an arm from MIT and a three-fingered hand developed in-house (that’s so nimble it can open and close 10 times per second) to release a strike zone pitch 90% of the time. Meanwhile the batting robot offers intense competition by wielding a 1000fps camera that can track the pitch in realtime, connecting with the ball almost every time it flies in the strike zone.

But before you get too excited, know that the pitching bot only throws the ball at 38kph. So it’s likely that a classic batting cage bot could strike out more MLBers than anything coming out of the labs…for now. Researchers hope to increase pitch speed to 150kph soon and work curve balls and sliders into the mix. We’ll see how well the batting robot (and puny humans) can keep up then. [Mainichi via Pink Tentacle via CrunchGear]

First, they saw chairs littered around rooms. Then they saw us. [CMU]

Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analogue age gave way to the digital, and most of our favourite toys were just being born.

Developed by researchers from Israel’s Technion University, what makes the robot feasible is that it isn’t self-propelled, saving size and engineering complication. Instead, the bot takes advantage of a magnetic field from outside the body, meaning that doctors can not only guide but also propel the the vein crawler forward at 9mm/second. And the robot shouldn’t run out of power mid-procedure, stalling it in your body as it drifts for your brain.

When the robot needs to park, those little arms can spring out *shiver* and grab onto vessel walls *shiver*shiver*shiver*shiver*shiver*shiver*shiver*.

Now researchers are looking at beefing up the bot, adding extra tools and even a camera to the mix. And as scary as a robot-filmed reality show starring my aorta may be, it sounds a lot better than having several layers of flesh peeled away via scalpel. [The Inquirer via Newlaunches]

The robot makes the soup, which customers order from a computer screen, where they can switch up the amount of soy sauce, saltiness and richness to make the perfect broth. Uchida hasn’t quite figured out how to completely replace humans yet, however, since they still make the noodles and add the toppings, though automating those tasks is next on his list. Still, even using meatbags, the entire process of assembling a bowl of ramen takes just two minutes. Yeah, faster than crappy instant noodles. [Mainichi via New Launches]

We’re big Guitar Hero/Rock Band fans, but buying a controller so that it can play the songs perfectly so that you don’t have to do anything? That’s taking it a bit too far.

If pretending to rock is so hard that you have to pretend to pretend to rock, you should just go and eat your way up to 350 kilos and give up on life. [eBay - Thanks Ben!]

It launches in September for just $US99, and is meant to be a social media companion. Your friends can interact with it via your Facebook page, and it can read messages off of Facebook to you. Its eyes reflect its mood, and will memorize 10-15 short vocal commands.

It doesn’t actually seem to do much, but it is kind of a neat toy for office workers and people who are in front of their computers all day. [MyDeskFriend via GetRobo via Technabob]