In the classic 1966 American science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, a submarine crew was miniaturized and injected into a body to fix a blood clot in the brain. That’s obviously not how future medical science is going to work, but the notion of creating microscopic machines to perform complex tasks is certainly on…
Like millions of other kids around the world, after seeing the original trilogy, R2-D2 instantly became my favorite Star Wars character. He seemed like the perfect sidekick, but the real Artoo was from a galaxy far, far away from mine, and the toy versions of the little droid were always lifeless clones of the…
Long gone are the days when robot vacuums would simply bump their way around your home while they randomly cleaned. But even with upgraded smarts and better sensors, modern robovacs can still wander into places you don’t want them, so Neato is introducing a potentially brilliant new feature letting you limit the…
There’s nothing unique about loving Lego. Millions of people wax nostalgic when they see those colorful bricks. Millions more never stopped building. I’ve always been a bit in between. I like zoning out by putting stuff together so, every couple of years, I’ll buy a Lego set and build it. But then what? Put it on my…
Boston Dynamics’ founder, Marc Raibert, recently gave a TED Talk where he trotted out some of the company’s recent innovations. The talk mostly features robot tricks we’ve seen before, except for a brilliant outtake of ATLAS trying to help out in a cafeteria that probably serves as the most accurate look at what life…
Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's weekly recap of the most delightful toys we’ve seen on the web. This week, a Grand Moff Tarkin figure that could give the Rogue One recreation a run for its money, some very cool (and very weird) robot monkeys, and even more Bat-mania with a slick new ride for the Dark Knight.
By today’s standards the original Teddy Ruxpin, essentially a stuffed toy bear wrapped around a cassette player, borders on archaic, but in 1985 few toys incorporated any kind of technology, and the bear felt as futuristic to a seven-year-old version of me as the original iPhone did a decade ago. It was one of the…
The phones in our pockets might be getting more and more complicated, but many researchers advancing the field of robotics are actually engineering simpler bots designed to reliably perform very basic tasks. So instead of one day facing a terrifying future filled with terminators, these squishy rolling donuts might be…
ATLAS is an incredible machine. There’s no way around that. First unveiled in 2013, the humanoid robot can now walk around autonomously, move boxes around, and implicitly threaten to destroy humanity. This level of sophistication is exactly why it’s so damn funny when ATLAS fucks up.
A little over a year after len_d69's custom Lego Voltron set was submitted to the Lego Ideas platform, the toymaker has officially decided to put it into production after the fantastic model of the five transforming robots from the original animated series successfully received 10,000 votes of support from fans.
Inspired by the traditional Japanese art of origami, self-folding robots can go places and do things traditional robots cannot. A major drawback to these devices, however, has been the need to equip them with batteries or wires. Researchers from Harvard have found a new way to overcome this problem, by designing…
Designing simpler spacecraft is what helped us finally put rovers on Mars and start exploring the Red Planet. Embracing simplicity might also give us simple, inexpensive robots that thrive doing very specific tasks, instead of multi-million dollar humanoids that have trouble just staying on their feet.
Building a robot that can replicate everything a human can do is both impossibly complicated and expensive. So, researchers at the IT University of Copenhagen are taking the exact opposite approach: building incredibly simple robots, on-demand, that only do what humans can’t.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have a new crew member—an adorable robotic ball capable of recording video while moving in zero gravity. Dubbed “Int-Ball,” the device will free astronauts to do more important work, while providing ground controllers with their own set of eyes.
Welcome back to another week of Toy Aisle, io9's collection of the most amazing Paul Reiser merchandise (and maybe other things) we’ve seen on the internet this week. We’ve got Black Panther and the Ultimate Spider-Man himself swinging into action, even more SDCC exclusives, and a very fancy Transformer.
Those blockbuster Marvel movies only show our favorite superheroes when they’re out saving the world. If you want a glimpse of what heroes like Iron Man do the rest of the time, look no further than this incredibly articulated humanoid robot called TEO, who’s recently learned to iron clothing.
The Islamic State has increasingly used drones and other robotic IEDs against American, Iraqi, and civilian targets in Iraq. And as the Coalition fights its way through Mosul, troops are discovering workshops filled with crude but deadly robotics used to bomb people sometimes dozens of times per day.
We’ve all seen the grade school science experiment where sticking a couple of electrodes into a potato produces enough current to power a small light bulb. But engineer Marek Baczynski took that experiment several steps further, building what could be the world’s first autonomous potato—and the ultimate housepet.
Lego’s third feature-length animated film, The Lego Ninjago Movie, doesn’t hit theaters until September. But the toymaker has already started to reveal a new series of sets based on the movie, which feature ninjas, giant robots, and... wait, do you really need anything else in a movie?
It’s assumed that when robots one day replace humans in boxing and ultimate fighting bouts, the ensuing battles will be like watching a real-life Transformers movie play out. But these tiny sumo robots tell a different story, with lightning fast fights that are over almost as quickly as they begin.
