A ballerina from the English National Ballet dances next to a two-meter-high robot snake, which looks every bit as graceful as she does. Maybe the future of robotics isn't dancing little humanoids or cute puppies, but a nice sinuous snake that can slither around your house cleaning your floors and picking up after you. They could be standard equipment in every home within a few years. Click through for more cool robot images from the Streetwise Robots event at the London Science Museum's Dana Centre.
The snake-bot is the work of Merlin Robotics, Nottingham Trent University and the Edinburgh College of Art. Also on display: the Shadow Robot company's dextrous hand robot, which uses 40 Air Muscles to achieve 24 movements. It's the most advanced robot hand on Earth. (At first, the Getty Images captions were a tad confusing, and made it seem as though the dextrous hand was part of the robot snake. Which conjured some frankly bizarre mental images.)
Images by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images.













Comments
This is the song that goes through my head when I see these pictures.
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All right. It's late and I'm on my second Laphraig, so I'm gonna do with a stream of consciousness here..
First pic, amazingly beautiful, elegant, and somewhat erotic. (but that's just me..I can find Nuns knitting erotic..)
Second pic... Holy Cats! It's a Golden Apple..Being plucked from the hand of a robot. Yeah. The numerous levels of symbolism make my head ache. Again, a beautiful image, though I think it would have been more significant if the robot were doing the plucking. (the whole grasping/understanding/coming to terms with chaos thing).
Third pic....Sweet crispy walnuts! Robo Roofie Rapists!
Four 'n Five. recaps.
Six. Nanoo Nanoo?
I for one welcome our robotic snake overlords.
@Git Em SteveDave: I'd would also like to remind them that as a star commenter, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground apple caves.
@Priam,
You poor, poor person.
Although the chick in the video seems to be enjoying herself quite a bit.
So the store I work at, we sell ballet shoes, and thus, this one magazine what deals with dance/ballet. One day I was skimming through said magazine and there was this neat blurb about somebody somewhere using AI to help choreograph a dance. It wasn't a whole article, just one of those "hey ain't this neat/weird" paragraphs but it's something that keeps bopping through my head.
@Priam: I'm just grinning like an idiot at this.
And when she drapes her leg over it...? o, wow.
Patti Smith does this version of "Hey Joe" where one of the lines is, "..the way you play the guitar makes me feel so... masochistic..."
It's not the same thing. But it's not entirely different, either.
@Priam: That video is the main evidence the robots will use for why they had to wipe us out. Thanks a lot, buddy!
Howie Choset at Carnegie Mellon Robotics Lab has been building modular snake-bots for a while now-- here's a cool video of one climbing a vertical column, popping a floor vent, rolling along a pipe, swimming in a pond, etc:
[download.srv.cs.cmu.edu]
@Priam:
I'm thinking this music is a little high-pitched for this hour, but I like it enough. And the snake-bot is fun. It makes me think that the future of the dildo is too perverse to write about, at least in here. "Oh, you're a human-basic male? No thanks. Once you've had bot, you never go back."
@Priam: That made my day. It made my day equal parts hilarious and scary.
"Forget Dancing with the Stars, Dancinng with the Robo Snake! Next on Fox!
"@Priam: You are my new master...teach me.
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