Michael Salter, an assistant professor at the university of Oregon, has been busy making “Styrobots”.

Salter began working with Styrofoam about five years ago when he was working at Mount Olive College in North Carolina.  His first solo show was at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C.

Salter is more interested in making a statement about his love hate relationship with consumerism than money.  The direct result of this is that so far all the robots have been smashed after the show is over.

The 22 foot tall robot shown here can be seen through October 19 as part of the San Jose Museum of Art’s exhibit entitled Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon. 

Link via (KomoNews)

Check out this cool weekend project.  Make your own spyware bot out of paper!

In order to highlight the growing problem of spyware bots, Norton, makers of anti-virus software, have produced the following paper craft bots.

You have 5 bots to choose from:

Denial of Service Bot, aka “DoS Bot”, Extortion Bot, aka “Bling Bot”, Identity Theft Bot, aka “Bot Simpson”, Spambot, aka “Spam-a-bot,” “Canned Spam”, Fraud Bot, aka “Phishing Bot,” “Bot Water”.

Check it out here.  If you make one send us a photo!

Link

Sega’s new Dream Dog DX Golden Retriever was unveiled recently at a Tokyo toy show.  This dog is much more realistic than other robotic dogs such as Sony’s Aibo.

The Dream Dog is capable of responding to voice commands such as sit, rollover and speak.

The cute dog will be available this coming September for about $279.

Link via (Robo Junkie)

We know, we already have enough flash drives and don’t really need another one.

But this cool chrome robot usb drive looks like a science fiction version of a cocktail strainer from the 1950’s.  We can always use a USB drive were the cap is somehow attached.

Available from E-corporategifts.com in 256MB or 1GB

Link via (BoingBoing)

Readybot, the house cleaning robot has almost been perfected.  See our previous post here, where all Readybot did was wash dishes.

Fear not intrepid viewer as the Readybot has been much improved.  Now he cleans up toys, empties the trash and even vacuums the floor by deploying a Roomba!

Unfortunately for us, Readybot is made by a group of engineers that all belong to a homebrew robot club, so Readybot will not be available for the public anytime soon.

Watch Readybot in action in the video below.

Link via (Gizmodo)