Although robots are now more advanced than ever, the thought of having one in your home still feels a bit strange (we blame I, Robot).

However, this quirky little white rabbit called Karotz aims to be your very own little robotic personal assistant. But remember, this is less of a tidy up that mess, make me a meal and do my homework robot and more of a play me a nice song and tell me how many unread emails I have robot.

Karotz can do a range of things, like surf the internet to answer a question, select and read emails, play you music, keep guard over your home (with a camera not a weapon), wake you up with your favourite radio station, read blogs out loud and even provide kids with a range of games and educational activities.

It has built-in voice recognition software, so you can speak to it directly, or control it using your smart phone (it has a special controller app for that) or your PC.

There are also a few other cool additions too, like different coloured ears and accessories for the little guys and the chance to interact with the wider Karotz community at www.karotz.com.

We're not really convinced that you'll use it everyday, it certainly won't transform the way you live and many of the things it can do in many ways just seem to promote laziness. However, we can see it becoming a bit of a cult product, a little like a much more clever and independent tamagotchi.

Available from Karotz for $129.99.

In the Star Trek universe it was the Borg Queen who introduced Data to skin that meant he could feel touch - in reality this is now being developed right here on earth.

The sci-fi dream is taking place at Stanford University, where Professor Zhenan Bao is hard at work creating something she calls "super skin": ultra-sensitive electronic skin that can detect the lightest touch. Strictly speaking this isn't the same as what the Borg Queen offered up (trust a Trekkie to keep tabs on the details) but it's still early days and we're confident this will be sorted.

The solar-powered technology will also one day be able to detect small traces of chemicals - meaning there is the potential for this new, exciting technology to be used by law enforcement, human or otherwise.

On a brighter note, the same technology could also be used in medicine, as the "super skin" can also pick up markers of disease: "For any particular disease, there are usually one or more specific proteins associated with it - called biomarkers - that are akin to a 'smoking gun,' and detecting those protein biomarkers will allow us to diagnose the disease," Bao said to the Stanford University News.

(Image credit)

Whether you think of them as victims, strong survivors or youtube gold, you probably haven't thought that three-legged dogs would be useful models for robo-design.

But a German research scientist, Martin Gross from the University of Jena, has realised he could learn some interesting things about locomotion from how three-legged dogs move. Research on how dogs with three legs learn to run like normal dogs provides interesting robotics findings and could answer the age-old question of how they do it.

Martin Gross first got the idea of studying dogs when staying with his brother-in-law who has four dogs one of which is missing a hind leg. Gross noticed though that less-legged pet was actually faster than the other three.

Robots don't handle losing legs so well. In a press release, Gross said robots are not meant to operate on an odd number of legs. "Natural terrestrial locomotion is designed for an even number of limbs. After limb loss (e.g. by an injury) a reorganization of the locomotive system is required," he explained.

So take a leg off a robot and most likely it will just fall over. And lie there. Twitching, until the batteries die. Gross is looking at helping robots recover from injuries, and learn to cope with fewer resources. Resources like legs.

This study is part of the European Union's Locomorph project to improve robot efficiency and usability, the latest in a string of interesting research projects the EU has commissioned. This project is meant to help develop robots that can adapt in the event of an "injury."

To explore the movement of the dogs, reflective stickers are placed on parts of them, they are placed on a treadmill and run for a bit in front of a camera. It records how their different legs move. According to the press release, they found that the locomotion of a dog's front legs don't seem to change much, if it has lost a hind leg. But dogs that have lost a front limb had to compensate more for motion. A dog carries much of its body weight on its front limbs and those legs are also used for braking, so more compensation is needed. Back legs are used more for propulsion.

[via news.discovery.com]

So perhaps fewer people in the UK are religious these days, but while people might choose to get married in a registrar's office rather than a church, not many would want their nuptials presided over by a robot.

In Japan, of course, it's different. A couple in Tokyo were married by a four-foot tall robot over the weekend. Called the iFairy the little bot is one of a range of intelligent talking robots that usually take guided tours of museums.

The couple's decision to take vows from a robot was prompted by the fact that the couple met through robots. The bride, Inoue, works for the company that makes the i-Fairy, and her husband, Shibata, is a client.

Inoue is obviously proud of her company - Kokora - product and just wants to show how versatile this chatty robot is. After taking the wedding the bride told Japanese media that she wanted to use her wedding to show people that robots can easily fit into their daily lives.

"I always felt that robots would become more integrated into people's everyday lives. This cute robot is part of my company, I decided that I would love to have it at my ceremony," Inoue said.

Well, it just adds one more alternative to the myriad different number of ways people could get married.

[via Reuters]

Why carry your shopping yourself when you can get a robot to do it? Okay, they still have trolleys rather than robots in the average British Tescos, but in Japan... they have bag-carrying robots. FTW Japan.

The robotic shopping assistant from company ATR is designed to make shopping more convenient and entertaining for the elderly. About the same size as a child, it's a lot more useful and carries the shopping while you potter about picking up satsumas and suchlike. The Robovie-II android nods its head, says thank you, recommends the apples and make suggestions about salad ingredients.

Judging from the video below, it certainly does make shopping more entertaining: the entire shop stops to gawp.

To use the system, shoppers first create a shopping list at home by simply telling the robot's on-screen avatar on a mobile device what they want to buy. Later, when the customer arrives at the store, sensors automatically detect the customer's individual mobile device. The user's data is wirelessly transmitted to a waiting robot, which greets the customer by name and says, "Let's start shopping."

The 67-year-old lady in the video below said that she thought it was fun talking to the robot, but a little plaintively that "she felt almost as if she were shopping with her grandchild". Note to grandchildren: your grandparents still prefer you to robots - go shopping with them more often.

I hope these come to Britain.

[via Pink Tentacle]

Ah, good, somebody is working on making brain chips so we can control computers by thinking about them. And that somebody is not a mad robo-obsessed scientist, but Intel, the commercial chip giant, making it seem more likely that chips will be arriving in a brain near you in the not-too-distant future.

According to ComputerWorld, Intel researchers in Pittsburgh told journalists that brain implants are harnessing human brain waves to operate computers, television sets and cell phones... letting you surf the internet, manipulate documents, and so on.

Of course the wholegetting a- computer-chip-embedded-in-your-skull thing will be voluntary (at least to start with mwhaha etc). But Intel reckons there will be lots of volunteers:

"I think human beings are remarkable adaptive," said Andrew Chien, vice president of research and director of future technologies research at Intel Labs. "If you told people 20 years ago that they would be carrying computers all the time, they would have said, 'I don't want that. I don't need that.' Now you can't get them to stop [carrying devices]. There are a lot of things that have to be done first but I think [implanting chips into human brains] is well within the scope of possibility."

Apparently we're all getting fed up with having to reach into our pockets and use our fingers to operate things. Well, that's what Intel research scientist Dean Pomerleau reckons: "users will soon tire of depending on a computer interface, and having to fish a device out of their pocket or bag to access it." Computerworld reports. "He also predicted that users will tire of having to manipulate an interface with their fingers."

"We're trying to prove you can do interesting things with brain waves," said Pomerleau. "Eventually people may be willing to be more committed ... to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts."

By learning the patterns and electronic signals that certain words or pictures make in your brain, a chip could be programmed to recognise them and could then send that information to a computer.

So thinking the word "water" could be the equivalent of typing it.

Still a distance off, scientists plan to make external headsets first before working on developing a microprocessor that could fit in your head.

Related: EEWWW of the week: get your phone embedded in your arm

While we're on robots - meet the... skiing robot. Is there anything these little androids can't do? Well yes I guess there a few things - love, make moral decisions etc.. but you can sure cross skiing off the list.

In the past few months robotics scientists have made a skiing robot. The mechanical skier can race downhill and even make turns to pass between gates. Described as a laptop on skis, the Skibot has to use the special technique of carving to ski properly.