He looks like a supporting character from classic comic strip Dan Dare, but there's nothing fictional about George the Robot. George was built in 1950 and is one of the first humanoid robots ever made. After 45 years powered down in a garden shed--how British--George is back online. George was created over the course of three weeks by former Royal Air Force officer Tony Sale, now 79. Having refined the design in four previous versions made of Meccano and cardboard, the then 19-year-old Sale built George in from aluminum and duralumin from a crashed Wellington bomber.

If you've got ground coffee and a few party balloons lying around, you have the ingredients for a universal robot gripper, according to researchers at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, and iRobot. In a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers including Hod Lipson, associate professor of mechanical engineering and computer science at Cornell, describe how they used granular material instead of multijointed fingers to create a robot gripper. The researchers put ground coffee into a latex balloon and attached it to a robot arm. When the coffee balloon is pressed around an object like a brush, above, it deforms and envelops the target. When the air is removed from the balloon, the ground coffee solidifies around the brush, forming a firm grip.

Instead of heavy textbooks, your school backpack could one day carry equipment that instantly maps out your environment in 3D. The Air Force recently announced that a portable laser backpack for 3D mapping has been developed by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. While bulky, the prototype backpack has already been used to map out two stories of Cory Hall, an electrical engineering building on the UC Berkeley campus. It rapidly gathers data while the user walks around inside a building. The information can be put together into a detailed, photo-realistic 3D map.

NASA seems to be continuously developing rovers to explore and possibly colonize the moon and Mars, but none is as downright bizarre as the Athlete, an imposing, spidery robot that H.G. Wells might love. Initially built in 2005, the latest-generation Athlete (or, All-Terrain Hex-Limbed Extra-Terrestrial Explorer) is actually two three-limbed robots that join together to form a platform for transporting payloads weighing up to 990 pounds in Earth gravity. At full height when standing, the prototype is about 13 feet tall, but that's only half the size of what a launch version of Athlete might be. The six articulated limbs can either roll or walk depending on the terrain, with a top speed of about 2 mph. Each limb can also serve as a manipulator.

It's the 21st century, and robots are supposed to be doing everything for us now. As with personal jet packs, that hasn't happened. But Evolution Robotics' Mint is one of a number of floor-cleaning robots designed to lighten the housework load. Announced at CES earlier this year and shipping this fall, Mint is an automatic floor cleaner--not a vacuum like iRobot's Roomba. You put a wet or dry dust cloth on the removable cleaning pad, push a button, and Mint gets to work.

How do you send a robot to space? When Robonaut 2 heads to the International Space Station this fall, it won't be strapped into a seat like its astronaut companions. Instead, it will be carefully packed inside dense foam and an aluminum frame that's specially designed to withstand the intense vibrations and gravity forces the bot will experience during its ascent into orbit. Engineers have spent several months devising the best way to secure the humanoid, nicknamed R2, so it arrives at the ISS unharmed. The engineers concocted a plan to attach the robot to a base plate with its back and shoulders supported.

The Negotiator, another tactical mobile robot that can climb stairs, seems to be a pared down, civilian version of the PackBot. Like the PackBot, the Negotiator can climb stairs, work by remote control, and be outfitted with tools for reconnaissance and chemical detection. While some municipalities have adopted it, the PackBot hasn't exactly become a common sight at your local police station. It seems that iRobot has finally realized that the PackBot, while fine for military units with large budgets, was just too expensive for local government agencies to adopt. "We believe that the low entry price point for iRobot Negotiator will help make it accessible to local, state and federal agencies that would not have been able to afford a robot otherwise," Joe Dyer, president of iRobot's Government and Industrial Robots division, said in a statement.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Experts in fields such as regenerative medicine; personalized health; information and data-driven health; and neuromedicine are gathering here this week for several days of discussions about the future of medicine. Organized under the appropriate rubric of "FutureMed," leaders in these fields, plus nearly 70 paying participants, are taking part in Singularity University's first FutureMed executive program. For two years, Singularity University (SU)--created by futurist Ray Kurzweil and X Prize CEO Peter Diamandis--has been bringing people together at NASA Ames Research Center here to discuss what are called "exponentially growing" technologies--things like 3D printing, self-organizing molecular circuits, advanced robotics, and more. But over two 10-week summer courses with graduate-student level participants and several 10-day programs aimed at successful executives, the institution has spread its focus across a wide variety of disciplines. FutureMed is SU's first attempt at homing in on a single field and having top-level discussions about where that field is heading and how it may change the world.

PALM DESERT, Calif.--If you're going to spend the cash to charter a private jet, shouldn't it be easy to book the plane? You would think the industry would simplify things for the wealthy, but that's not the case, according to start-up FlyRuby, which unveiled its service at the Demo Spring conference here today. Indeed, company CEO Michael Leek says that it can often take hours to figure out a suitable private plane charter between two cities. That's where FlyRuby comes in, Leek said. A former U.S. Marine with a passion for the aviation industry, Leek said he wanted to identify the inefficiencies in the industry--and he realized that one of the biggest was that there was no simple way to quickly identify the specific plane that makes the most sense for a flight.

MENLO PARK, Calif.--If you've never seen a robot climb straight up an entirely flat vertical wall, I dare you not to be impressed the first time you do. That was my certainly experience when I watched a wall-climbing robot do its thing at SRI International here the other day. Indeed, my host, who had been with me through several product and project demonstrations over about three hours, noticed how excited I was by watching this little device go straight up the wall, and, I think, began to wonder if I was actually interested in any of the other things I'd seen. In fact, she shouldn't have worried. I was at SRI as part of my ongoing Road Trip at Home series and was getting a rapid-fire lay of the land at this Silicon Valley research and development--and incubation--powerhouse.