In a breakthrough for future human prosthetic limbs, two monkeys at the University of Pittsburgh have successfully thought-operated a robot arm and used it to feed themselves for the first time. The macaques have electrodes implanted in their brains, monitoring about 100 cells, the signals from which drive the robot arm. The trained monkeys can now use the arm to grab food, even if it's moved around, and often reach for more while still chewing on the first treat. They'd better not show them any cyborg smasher movies though: as the saying goes "monkey see... monkey do", eh? [New Scientist]

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Noah Shachtman over at Wired has a very interesting look at iRobot's six year battle with Robotic FX, a company started by a former employee who allegedly (and probably) stole schematics and plans in order to build a competitor. There's too much detail to work into a short summary, but Jameel Ahed, the former employee, was caught by a private investigator deleting documents and shredding CDs containing data that belonged to iRobot.

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Remember the massage pants? Well, automated massage seems to have taken a step further on from those with the Dainichi Auto Healther Reiz DZ-270: it's a robo-table that can massage you from your head to to toe. You just select your program from the touchscreen, lie back, pull the hood over, switch on some music on the built-in audio system and let its robot kneaders wiggle around under the bed surface. It's even clever enough to adjust its speed and pressure to suit which bit of you its dealing with, and has heating too. If you prefer your relaxation delivered with robotic precision rather than the fingers of a trained person, then you'll have to fork out around US$13,500 for this. [Akihabaranews]

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Are you a feeble, pasty pansy? For the low price of US$1000 a month, you could overcome your physical limitations with a HAL exoskeleton from Cyberdyne. While HAL prototypes have been around for a few years now, Cyberdyne has just begun building a lab that will mass produce 400-500 of the suits per year starting this October.

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Scientists have developed a pair of robotic hands that are both strong and sensitive. The tweezers can guide themselves to pick up and move individual cells without damaging them, and have a grip that can be as slight as 20 nanoNewtons of force. In fact, so advanced are the little grippers, that they can be hitched up to a microscope and, with the right software, function without human control. More below.

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Plugging right in to that eerie "they're watching me" feeling you're supposed to get from normal portrait paintings, Opto-Isolator is an artwork that takes the sensation into the scary, robotic 21st Century. Its realistic-looking eyeball actually responds to an onlooker's gaze with a bunch of human-like movements, including coy side-glances and blinks. If the gallery doesn't creep you out enough, the video certainly will. UPDATED.

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Very few people know more about the practical robotics industry more than iRobot CEO Colin Angle. We had a nice chat with him (he did all the talking) earlier today about the state of the robotics industry, why iRobot is essentially the only company doing what they're doing in the field, what kind of robots are coming in the future and why robots are necessary for the human race to survive.

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Japanese researchers have developed a new approach to robotics that could revolutionise the future of artificial limbs. The team, from Okinawa University, has come up with an amazing "muscle" design that is driven by compressed air and is simpler than the designs of many other prosthetic arms currently in development. More info, plus a video of the "muscles" in action after the jump.

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Who says you have to scape up millions of research bucks to make a working robot arm? Meet Wooden Menace, a roughly functioning robotic appendage that Chris, an enterprising craftsman at PyroElectro, put together for less than $60. Its parts are carved out of wood, and Chris connected those parts with a few servo controllers and a $10 PIC18F452 microchip processor to make this crudely functioning robotic arm that he steers with a cloned PS1 controller. After 25 hours of work and some tricky programming, we're thinking Chris proved his point. [PyroElectro, via Make]