Michael Jackson Planned 'Robot Duplicate' Of Himself

From Register:

Dead megastar droid zombie blueprints offered for $1m.

Famous dead pop legend Michael Jackson intended to construct an eerily-lifelike robotic duplicate of himself, according to reports. Detailed three-dimensional scans of the deceased globo-celeb's body were made, and the super-accurate body maps are now said to be on sale for a million dollars.

The story was reported yesterday by the Daily Star, which says that the occasionally troubled dead overlord of pop had the scans made in 1996 "in a bizarre bid to build a robot twin... [Unidentified] scientists say following his death on June 25, the eerie images could be used to bring him back".

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Robo-Negotiator Talks Down Armed Lunatic

You Want My Hydraulic Fluid! Take My Hydraulic Fluid! Via OK.gov

From Popular Science:

Hostage situations are often described like explosive devices, as ticking time bombs waiting to go off. And just as bomb disposal units have robots to help with their job, now police negotiators have a bot of their own for defusing a different kind of explosive situation.

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Meet Aida, The In-Car Robot Who Will Take The Stress Out Of Driving

Aida is embedded into the car's dashboard. The technology is being developed by MIT and Volkswagen

From The Daily Mail:

Driving could soon be a far more pleasant experience thanks to a personal in-car robot being developed by researchers.

The Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA) will be able to tell you the best route home based on traffic reports, remind you to pick up petrol and suggest places you may like to visit.

The robot, which sits on the dashboard, is being developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in collaboration with Volkswagen.

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Robots That Care

Image: With extroverts, robots can speak forcefully; with introverts, they are more soothing.

From The New Yorker:

Advances in technological therapy.

Born in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, Maja Matarić originally wanted to study languages and art. After she and her mother moved to the United States, in 1981, her uncle, who had immigrated some years earlier, pressed her to concentrate on computers. As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Matarić wrote software that helped robots to independently navigate around obstacles placed randomly in a room. For her doctoral dissertation, she developed a robotic shepherd capable of corralling a herd of twenty robots.

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Robot Army Could Explore Space, Researchers Say

From Discover Magazine:

Instead of spending time and money planning a manned mission to Mars, why not send an army of robots into space to do all the work? A fleet of robots could be deployed to explore far-away planets, according to researchers at Caltech’s Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory.

From the Telegraph:

Robotic airships and satellites will fly above the surface of the distant world, commanding squadrons of wheeled rovers and floating robot boats…The systems will transform planetary exploration, says [Wolfgang] Fink, who envisages the cybernetic adventurers mapping the land and seascapes of Saturn’s moon, Titan—believed to have lakes of standing liquid—as well as closer planetary neighbors like Mars.

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