An evening pause: It is a commercial for KUKA robotics, and it is a bit staged, a competition between a KUKA robot and table tennis professional Timo Bollo playing music on glasses. Nonetheless, the punchline is good. Human creativity can always beat out robotic programming.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
The 2015 Darpa Robotics Challenge (DRC) is underway, and you can watch!
The quote in the title gives a bit of the flavor, but this is cool engineering that will definitely have important applications in both disaster recovery as well as exploration in extreme environments.
Link here. The impression I get is of a very vibrant commercial industry now making a lot of money developing robots for a gigantic range of industrial and commercial uses. Most are industrial, but it is very clear that this technology is very steadily easing its way into public use.
