The fundamental technology behind the da Vinci Surgical System was originally developed at SRI International, and it's not like they've been sitting around building thumb-twiddling robots since then. This is Taurus, a little manipulator robot that was unveiled to the public for the first time at the National Robotics Week Robot Block Party at Stanford's VAIL automotive research lab. When I say Taurus is little, it's because the robot was specifically designed to fold itself into a box shape that's a mere 14" wide and 5" tall [36 cm wide and 13 cm tall]. It needs to be so compact because of what its job is: Taurus is meant to be shoved into small spaces in vehicles to detect and defeat vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices. It doesn't have wheels or legs or anything like that; instead, it's intended to be mounted directly onto the robotic arm of a Talon or a PackBot, which is an innovative way to go.

With the DARPA Robotics Challenge looming large on the horizon, it's easy to overlook robots that aren't taking part. One of them was Nino, a humanoid unveiled earlier this year by the National Taiwan University's Robotics Laboratory. Unlike the DARPA robots, Nino may not find itself performing tasks in dangerous situations any time soon. But this robot has some special skills: It is likely the first full-sized humanoid to demonstrate sign language. "Sign language has a high degree of difficulty, requiring the use of both arms, hands, and fingers as well as facial expressions," said Professor Han-Pang Huang, who leads NTU's Robotics Lab.

Following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that crippled Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, Honda reportedly received numerous requests to send its humanoid robot ASIMO to help with the recovery. ASIMO, however, wasn't designed to work outside a lab or office environment, let alone a highly radioactive rubble-strewn zone. Now it looks like Honda is working to address the problem by developing a bigger, beefed-up version of ASIMO that can walk, crawl, and perform tasks in a disaster environment. After the Fukushima accident, many observers were surprised that Japan, a country known for its advanced robots, wasn't better prepared and had to rely on U.S. robots instead. In the months that followed, Japanese government agencies and companies got to work to develop capable disaster-response robots.

We're running late today, and this is totally, completely Evan's fault. Evan, if you're reading this, dude, who said you could go on vacation and take time off from the blog? Er, now I remember, you told me about your vacation like a month ago, and I agreed to keep things going until you return. OutRunner is a bio-inspired legged robot that can reach speeds up to 32 kilometers per hour (20 miles per hour). It's self-balancing and has a battery life of 2 hours, and you control it with a smartphone.

The way to make a social home robot seems to be pretty standardized: basically, you cram a tablet computer into a cute robot body with some degrees of freedom and do your best to make sure that your voice recognition and conversation algorithms are as good of an experience as you possibly can, using a screen to help you out when necessary. This is fine, if you can get it to work well, but there's a concern that it's just going to turn into an experience that's essentially talking to a gussied-up version of your phone. A group of researchers including Michal Luria, Guy Hoffman, Benny Megidish, Oren Zuckerman, Roberto Aimi, and Sung Park from IDC Herzliya, Cornell, and SK Telecom have developed a prototype social robot called Vyo. Vyo is "a personal assistant serving as a centralized interface for smart home devices." Nothing new there, but what sets Vyo apart is how you interact with it: it combines non-anthropomorphic design with anthropomorphic expressiveness and a tactile object-based control system into a social robot that's totally, adorably different.

For those of us who have no friends, we at least have video games. And thanks to artificial intelligence, the computer-controlled adversaries we play against are always getting better. Most games aren't at the point where the AI can give a skilled human serious competition without having the playing field tilted in its direction, but that's okay, because we still derive pleasure and satisfaction from beating them anyway. What AI is missing is physical embodiment. You know, something that you can scream at when you lose and gloat over when you win.

Illustration of a disaster response scenario part of the DARPA Robotics Challenge: The robot on the right uses a power tool to break through a wall, and the one on the left turns a valve to close a leaking pipe. DARPA to the robotics community: the challenge is on. Today the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is announcing a bold new program aiming to advance robotics technology for disaster response. The DARPA Robotics Challenge is offering tens of million of dollars in funding to teams from anywhere in the world to build robots capable of performing complex mobility and manipulation tasks such as walking over rubble and operating power tools. It all will culminate with an audacious competition with robots driving trucks, breaking through walls, and attempting to perform repairs in a simulated industrial-disaster setting.

Action figures that pose themselves may be the next big thing in Japan's billion dollar plastic model industry. Speecys, a robotics company founded in 2001 by Tomoaki Kasuga (following a stint working on Sony's robot dog Aibo), has unveiled what it calls the world's first "Motion Figure" system. The company's MF-201 prototype consists of a 25-centimeter-tall human-shaped skeleton complete with 20 wire-driven joints, which allow it to move its head, arms, legs, and torso. The wires are threaded through the body and down one of the legs, which acts as the figure's primary support. From there, the wires are fed into a box that conceals a set of servo motors as well as Bluetooth LE, Wi-Fi connectivity, speakers, and sensors.

At a press conference in Palo Alto, Calif., today, Toyota is announcing the first step of what is expected to be a major push into artificial intelligence and robotics, technologies that the company sees as critical for addressing current and future societal challenges. Toyota, the world's largest automaker by sales, says it will establish two collaborative research centers at MIT and Stanford, with an investment of $50 million over the next five years. The initial focus will be on accelerating the development of AI with applications to smarter and safer vehicles, as well as robots that can make our lives better at home, especially as we age. Toyota says an immediate goal is to figure out ways to save lives on the road. But the company is very clear that it's not trying to develop a fully autonomous car in the same way that Google and many others are.

We live in a world of sounds, full of beautiful music, birds chirping, and the voices of our friends. The sound of a door opening can alert us to a friend's arrival, and a door slamming can alert us to an impending argument. HEARBO (HEAR-ing roBOt) is a robot developed at Honda Research Institute–Japan (HRI-JP), and its job is to understand this world of sound, in a field called Computational Auditory Scene Analysis. At the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems and RO-MAN this year, several papers describing HEARBO's latest functionalities were introduced. With the dream of the futuristic robotic butler, researchers are trying to make robots understand our voice commands, a bit like Apple's Siri but from 2 meters away.