While it’s generally becoming more accepted that exercise is a good thing that we should all do more of, the good folk at Toshiba are still designing with the couch potato very much in mind.
“ApriPoko sits in the living room and waits for you to use a remote control. When its sensors detect infrared rays emitted by a remote, the robot speaks up: “What did you just do?” it asks. Tell ApriPoko what you did (”I turned on the stereo” or “I changed to channel 321,” for example), and it commits the details to memory. Then, next time you want to turn on the stereo or change the channel, simply tell ApriPoko and it transmits the appropriate IR signal directly to the device.”
We may not have our long-promised robot butlers yet, but ApriPoko should at least take on the duties that most of us relied on our younger siblings to perform … [image lifted from linked Pink Tentacle article]
Back in college, my computer science professor told us that AI was still not very good, only about the level of a fungus. Well, it seems that we’ve come a long way, all the way to cockroach level. Researchers in Brussels have developed a robot cockroach that can mimic the behavior of their real life brethren, though they look like little, white boxes. Evidently, behaving like a cockroach doesn’t make you a cockroach, so the robots were covered with cockroach pheremones. After this, the robots were able to influence the roach clan, convincing them to come out of the darkness and nest in bright areas. It’s really quite cool. Next up, they’re jumping straight to robot chickens, I guess.
MAARS features new software controls, which allow the robot’s driver to select fire and no-fire zones. The idea is keep the robots from accidentally shooting a flesh-and-blood American. A mechanical range fan also keeps MAARS’ gun pointed away from friendly positions.
The robot is also equipped with a GPS transmitter, so it can be seen on — and tap into — the American battlefield mapping programs, just like tanks and Humvees. These “Blue Force Trackers” have been credited with dramatically reducing friendly-fire incidents during the Iraq war. MAARS comes with an extra fail-safe, which won’t allow it to fire directly at its own control unit.
Last Summer, the U.S. Army sent three armed Talon IIIB robots, also know as SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detecting System) to Iraq, where they were handed over to the 3rd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division for “more realistic” testing. Apparently the tests went well – the commander of the 3rd Brigade has asked for twenty more. The army already has 80 more on order.
The [robots] will be used as a 125 pound armed sentry, not a combat droid. Or so the official announcement went. So far, the tests appear to have been successful. Swords can also be armed with a 7.62mm machine-gun (and 300 rounds of ammo), a .50 caliber sniper rifle or a 40mm automatic grenade launcher.
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While it’s generally becoming more accepted that exercise is a good thing that we should all do more of, the good folk at Toshiba are still designing with the couch potato very much in mind. 
Back in college, my computer science professor told us that AI was still not very good, only about the level of a fungus. Well, it seems that we’ve come a long way, all the way to 
