Rodney Brooks, head of CSAIL at, will be stepping down for a sabbatical in June of 2007. CSAIL is the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. Rodney is also one of the founders of iRobot, makers of the popular Roomba. In an interview with Talking Robots, Rodney talks about his insight [...]

I give you Geminoid. Holy double vision Batman! Geminoid is a robot built by professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University. The robot is designed to look like him and to take his place in meetings and lectures while the professor is doing something else. The professor wanted to explore the idea [...]

Lijin Aryananda has graduated from CSAIL, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. While earning her Ph.D at MIT Aryananda created a friend name Mertz. This friendly robot has a vocabulary of 40 words to engage passerby in conversation. If Mertz cannot understand you, it will ask you to speak louder or move [...]

A year old French company wants to take on the mighty Microsoft. The companies name is Gostai and the product is called Urbi. This company of 8 employees wants to have it’s software in every robot. The software is easy to use and works with all platforms. They are currently offering [...]

First up this week are two Roomba hacks. Bobby Zokaites, a student at Alfred College in New York has created a way to modify Roombas so that they paint. The opening of the show entitled, Our Man in Havana: The Vacuum Cleaner in Art will feature a demonstration of 3 painting Roombas painting on a [...]