What’s even more interesting is that the old phrase of “I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids” might be applicable here, with Ahed standing a pretty good chance (thanks to a mysterious military contract backer) of getting away with this scheme if he didn’t destroy evidence. After all, even the military contacts who were trying to choose between vendors were angling for his robot to win. [Wired]

Using sensors attached to the skin, the suit supposedly moves effortlessly with your muscles and it has the capability of increasing your strength up to 10 times the norm. It also has a continuous operating time of about 2 hours and 40 minutes. As mentioned, the monthly rental fee has been set at US$1000 which includes US$300 for maintenance and upgrades. No word on whether or not they plan on selling these things outright, but I would be perfectly happy renting one and going all Hulk on my enemies for a month or so. [Cyberdyne via LovingtheMachine vie BotJunkie via Boing Boing Gadgets]

The tweezers were developed by a team from the University of Toronto, and use basic robotic concepts, but on a microscopic scale. What is so extraordinary about them, however, is that they can sense when they are getting close to things, such as surfaces or cells, and so avoid collisions. The tweezers are also aware of the strength of their grip. Manipulated by the software, they can get into position much faster than they could if they were controlled by a person.

The tweezers are just three millimeters long, and their tips just ten micrometers wide. Expect to see them being used in tissue engineering or for creating nano- and microscale devices. [NewScientist]

An inversion of the normal, the robot was designed by artist Golan Levin to tackle the questions of “What if artworks could know how we were looking at them? And, given this knowledge, how might they respond to us?” So, with some clever electronics, Opto-Isolator looks at its viewer eye-to-eye, dodges long stares and blinks exactly a second after the watcher does.

We’ve all known moments when eye contact with someone either goes right or horribly wrong, shivers go down your spine, and results are either a make-out session or a thump. Who knows what ogling a robot feels like? People who visited Opto-Isolator when it was shown recently in the Bitforms gallery, New York, I suppose. And any actor who’s starred alongside Jim Henson’s creatures.

Let’s hope someone makes an Opto-Isolator app for mobiles. It would be totally cool to have on my BlackJack, and have it pop up unexpectedly, scaring the crap out of my wife, or freaking out the cat. Maybe other gadgets should be able to give us the eye—tell us which in the comments. [Flong via Oh Gizmo]

Update: We got hold of Opto-Isolator’s creator, Golan Levin, and asked him some questions.

KE: What’s that creepy shiny black body made of?
Golan: The exterior shell is a 3D print from an FDM machine, with an automotive paint job.

KE: What’s inside?
Golan: …just your usual servomotors and microcontrollers. It might be worth pointing out that the entire unit is self-contained, i.e., it houses a mini-ITX format dual-core Intel PC running custom computer vision software. The only cable coming in is for power. An Arduino microcontroller board (popular with artists and hobbyists) runs the servo-motors (there are 3 motors: x, y, eyelid).

KE: What kind of programing did you do to get it to identify people watching it?
Golan: The software is written in C++ using the OpenFrameworks.cc wrapper and OpenCV libraries for face detection.

KE: Are any of your other artworks inspired by the same idea as Opto-Isolator?
Golan: I’m currently working on a constellation of projects that are all concerned with the theme of gaze as a new mode of human-computer interaction. All of these projects respond in some way to how people look at them.

So there you go, folks: keep your eyes peeled for new eerie, eyeballing artworks sometime soon.

Despite the inroads iRobot’s made, robotics hasn’t become a true industry even though the idea of robotics has been around for 40-odd years. The goal of the company is to get robots in homes to be ubiquitous. Their market penetration is currently only 1-2%, but it’s even lower among the non-gadgety middle Americans that they’re aiming for. “One robot company doesn’t make an industry.”

Why are so few people getting into the robotics industry now? Colin says it’s because the market is incredibly hard, the margins are terrible, and very few companies have the collective knowledge necessary to enter the market. It took them 10 years to get enough company knowledge from partnering with the industrial cleaning industry (among others) in order to create a robot that’s cheap enough and good enough to be used as a consumer electronics device. Other companies like Samsung or LG—who can design a device with the highest-quality parts for the lowest prices—can possibly enter in the robotics field, but they haven’t chosen to yet.

So what’s to come? Angle emphasised the fact that robots are going to be necessary to live the way we’ve become accustomed to. As the population ages here and in places like Japan (where three out of every two people are over the age of 150), robots are going to have to provide health and home care for the elderly. iRobot is entering this market with their ConnectR webcam robot that lets doctors or nurses monitor someone at home and have a “presence” there without actually being there.

He says that Japan is making developments in this area, but most of their designs (like the robot that helps you get out of bed, the dead human picker-upper and the exoskeleton) seem too expensive for the average elderly person to afford. ConnectR is just a start, but the industry around care for the elders is just going to get bigger.

Colin also talked about the military industry, which they’ve entered into as well. Their PackBot, which helped clean out mines in Afghanistan before moving onto Iraq, is just the tip of the iceberg. By using robots instead of humans to do dangerous missions like cleaning out a building, our military can use non-lethal force because the operator of the robot isn’t concerned about his own life. This “shoot second” principal is supposed to save lives, even when we arm robots with weapons, as they’re starting to. And with these lethal robots, there’s always going to be a human “in the loop”, meaning there won’t be any autonomous killer robots that annihilate humanity.

Another very interesting piece of the robotics puzzle lay in the oil industry, which they developed a robot for in the mid to late ’90s that improved oil refining by 100%. There wasn’t a huge demand then, but there’s obviously going to be a giant demand soon.

If iRobot’s CEO has his way, we’re going to have a robot in all of our houses. We can’t wait.

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]