Robots

on of Beethoven’s 5th symphony, navigating an assault course, and even roller-skating.

See footage of four QRIOs performing a complicated dance routine, (Windows Media Player required) recorded in December 2003.

2. Roomba and Scooba - domestic robots

Starting in 2002, MIT spin-off iRobot, of Massachusetts, US, finally brought domestic robots to the masses, with their small and affordable Roomba and Scooba vacuuming and mopping robots - retailing at less than $200. Sales of all household robots have boomed, and in 2005 more than a million were thought to be in operation worldwide.

See videos of the Roomba Vacuuming Robot at work on the IRobot Corporation’s web site (Macromedia Flash Player required).

3. The self-replicating robot

In 2005 Cornell University researchers, in Ithaca, New York, built the first robot able to create exact copies of itself. The device is built of small mechanical building blocks that can swivel, and also attach themselves to one another using electromagnets. Three or four blocks piled on top of each other to form a tower can create an identical tower by swivelling round like a crane to pick up other nearby blocks and pile them on top of each other.

See footage of the self-replication process (courtesy of Hod Lipson at Cornell University - Windows Media Player required).

4. The spherical security guard

This spherical roving robot designed to detect and report intruders was created in Sweden. It is based on a robot probe originally designed to explore other planets. The automated security guard is propelled by a pendulum suspended from an axis inside the casing, controlled by a motor. Moving the pendulum forwards causes the robot roll along, but the pendulum can also swing from side to side, giving the robot the ability to steer left and right.

See an animation and images of the robot on the Rotundus AB web site (Quicktime required).

5. Aibo - the robotic pet

Aibo - Japanese for companion - is Sony’s robotic pooch. It can walk, sit, sleep, beg, yap and perform lots of other convincingly dog-like actions. When Aibo was first released in 1999 it sold out in 20 minutes in Japan - by 2002, 100,000 people owned them.

Brand-new Aibos all behave alike. But over time they develop their own personality as they interact with people. Just how they develop depends on the interaction between their environment and their innate abilities. Aibo owners can also use software to reprogram their pets and add new behaviours.

A short video, available from Sony’s research and development lab in Paris, France (Windows Media Player required), shows an Aibo pup that has learnt to play with its toys and bark at another robot nearby.

6. Stanley - the autonomous car

Stanley, an autonomous racing car, has been developed at Stanford University in Palo Alto California. It bagged a $2 million prize in October 2005 for winning the DARPA Grand Challenge, a tough desert race for driverless vehicles.

Stanley has the body of a converted Volkswagen Touareg SUV, and navigates using seven onboard Pentium M computers and an array of devices that includes GPS, four laser range-finders, three cameras, a radar and inertial sensors.

See a video of Stanley at work here on the Stanford University web site (available in several formats).

7. Asimo - the first walking humanoid robot

Asimo, who stands at 130 centimetres tall and weighs 54 kilograms, was the world’s first walking humanoid robot. The latest model can run at 6 kilometres an hour, jog in circles and zig-zag. A prototype unveiled in Tokyo, in December 2005, was capable of guiding guests to a meeting room, serving coffee on a tray and pushing a cart with a load of up to 10 kilograms.

See videos of Asimo running and delivering a tray of coffee on the Honda web site (Macromedia Flash Player required).

8. NASA’s Mars rovers - labs on wheels

NASA’s quad-bike-sized laboratories-on-wheels were built to last just 90 days on Mars and cover no more than 600 metres. But the roving robots have now logged more than an entire Martian year on the surface and collectively covered 12 kilometres of terrain.

See a NASA animation showing how the rovers work (Quicktime required).

9. The tiniest remote-controlled robot

In September 2005, researchers at the University of California in Berkeley created the tiniest mobile robot ever - narrower than a human hair. It is simply a sliver of silicon one hundredth of a millimetre thick. This can be precisely steered - like a remote controlled car - to move in any direction across the surface of a special plate. Powered by a grid of electrodes underneath a surface layer, the bot crawls around at a speed of about 200 micrometers per second and can push specks of dust, or other "dead" robots.