Cool Robots Views

General Goods

We are all familiar with that irritating little vacuum cleaner called the Roomba. It is one of the first robots brought home by consumers to benefit their lives. We have seen the movies - the awesome gigantic robots that still seem to belong to the future. Out there is a world of technological geniuses who are creating and have built very cool and functional bots. Some may one day enrich our lives, others will simply makes us gawk.

Japan gets all the cool stuff. Last week the International Robot Exhibition (iREX) finished in Tokyo with hundreds of exhibitors and more than 100,000 visitors. iREX 2009 focused on enhancing market awareness for current and emerging robot technologies. As such, companies put their best robots on display and hyped their abilities and possible applications. If there0’s a robot thatr’s going to make a big splash in the industry in the next few years, chances are it was at the exhibition. Check out some of the cool pics and videos after the break.

I just received this new book Cool Robots by Sean Kenney and thought it was worth a mention. Ita’s a very short book, 32 pages, about the size and length of a picture book, and itw’s mostly photos of Kenneyu’s robot creations with a little bit of text and some assembly instructions scattered throughout. Kenney runs the mocpages.com website for people to share their MOCs (u“My Own Creationt”), but he also has some other pretty impressive Lego credentials. According to the publisher:

The book itself is fun to look at but the :“Instructions Insiden” tag is a little misleading—the two pictured on the cover, for instance, are among those without instructions. Still, if youd’ve got young kids who like Lego, they may get inspired by Cool Robots or by visiting SeanKenney.com.