Pino Robot the best robot in the world :

Pino the robot loves to play games and the more you interact with Pino, the more he learns.

Say hello to your smart robotic friend. He's so cool, you'll never want to put him down! The more you interact with Pino, the more he does.

Pino lost his memory after his space ship crashed to earth. Now he's alone and needs your care and attention. Look after Pino and be rewarded with fun and friendship as his personality grows.

Pino the robot loves to play games and the more you interact with Pino, the more he learns. Pino will learn to walk and sing and responds to sound and your voice. Pino has realistic emotions: he can be happy, sad, angry or sleepy.

Leave your bedroom and Pino will guard your room from any unwanted intruders! Put two Pinos together and watch them talk and interact with each other.

Our verdict: The best Toy robot in the world!

Cutting-Edge Robots Show Off in Japan :

Today marks the start of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation(ICRA 2009) in Kobe, Japan, where researchers from around the world will gather to discuss the latest advances in robotics--from cutting-edge climbing machines to robots that politely ask for directions.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania will present the latest version of RiSE, a four-legged robot that can both scamper along the ground and rapidly climb a tree or a pole. RiSE V3 was designed and built at Boston Dynamics--the company behind the four-legged military robot BigDog. It has four legs, and tiny claws made from surgical needles that can dig into a vertical surface. The robot's front legs are long enough to hug a telephone pole, and it can climb at 21 centimeters per second.

"RiSE V3 is the first general-purpose legged machine to achieve this vertical climbing speed," says Daniel Koditschek, a professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, who led the work. Because the robot can walk, climb, and rest quietly on a pole while conserving energy, Koditschek says that it could "play an invaluable role in search and rescue, reconnaissance, surveillance, or inspection applications."

Another mobile robot set to debut at the event is Adelopod, developed by researchers at the University of Minnesota. Adelopod, which is about the size of a video controller, doesn't use legs or even wheels to get around. Instead, it flips itself over and over using a pair of 12-centimeter arms . This tumbling mode of locomotion is simple, saves energy, and doesn't require complex hardware, say the researchers involved. "Given its size, it can go places that other robots cannot," saysNikos Papanikolopoulos, director of the university'sCenter for Distributed Robotics. The group has also developed the larger Loper robot, which can carry several Adelopods and scatter them throughout an area.

Researchers at the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), in Germany, have designed a robot that can find its way around a city without GPS or preloaded maps. It does so by asking pedestrians for directions and using gesture tracking and voice recognition to interpret commands. It also uses human tracking, obstacle detection, and map building to guide itself around a busy city. "The novelty about our research is that we have a robotic system that uses human instructions as global waypoints for navigation in an outdoor environment," says Andrea Bauer, one of the researchers at TUM. "The robot can retrieve missing route knowledge just like a person, by asking passersby."

Robotic Weather Planes :

Fleets of robotic aircraft could improve weather forecasts.

Weather forecasters may not have the best reputation for accuracy, but with today's computational modeling, it's possible to make pretty reliable weather predictions up to 48 hours in advance. Researchers at MIT, however, believe that autonomous aircraft running smart storm-chasing algorithms could get that figure up to four days. Better weather forecasting could help farmers and transportation authorities with planning and even save lives by providing earlier warnings about storms and severe weather, says Jonathan How, principal investigator at MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Long-term predictions don't necessarily go wrong because of forecasting models, but rather because initial conditions were inaccurately measured, saysMartin Ralph, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's earth systems laboratory, in Boulder, CO. Such inaccuracies come from gaps in the data, he says.

Ground-based sensors are already used to record temperature, wind speed, humidity, air density, and rainfall, but they gauge conditions only at ground level, says How. At sea, where many severe weather fronts originate, the coverage is much sparser. Satellite observations help build up a picture, but satellites are blind to a number of useful types of data, such as low-altitude wind speed and atmospheric boundary conditions, says Ralph.

To get the most accurate readings, you really want to get your sensors into the weather itself, says How. In theory, weather balloons can do this, but only if they happen to be in the right place at the right time. So weather services currently attempt to track down weather systems using piloted planes that fly prescribed routes, taking measurements along the way. The logistics of deploying such planes is so complicated, however, that it's difficult to change their routes in response to changing weather conditions.

Helping Robots Get a Grip :

One of the main things preventing robots from lending a hand with everyday tasks is a simple lack of manual dexterity. New research from a team at Columbia University NY could help robots--and robotic prosthetics--get a better grip on all kinds of objects.

Peter Allen, a professor at Columbia University and director of its Robotics Group, and colleague Matei Ciocarlie developed a simpler way to control a dexterous robotic hand by drawing on research in biology. They realized that while human hands have about 20 degrees of freedom (20 joints that can each bend), each joint is not capable of moving completely independently; instead, its movements are linked to those of other joints by muscles or nerves.

Traditionally, the software used to control a complex robot hand has tried to account for all the degrees of freedom in the robotic hand's joints, but this is computationally cumbersome and slows the robot down. Instead, Allen and Ciocarlie decided to limit the movement of a robot hand in the same way a human hand is limited. By linking its joints in this way, they showed it is possible to control a complicated robotic hand with faster, more efficient algorithms and without losing any of its functionality. "You can learn from biology to reduce the degrees of freedom," says Allen. "Even though you may have 20 degrees of freedom, you don't need to use them."

The researchers experimented with four different kinds of complex robotic hand, each of which had multiple joints. They developed software to control each gripper by linking its joints. In simulations and real-life tests, the software was able to quickly calculate grasping positions in order to grab different objects, including a wine glass, flask, telephone, model airplane, and ashtray.