SWORDS military robots deployed in Iraq are being recalled due to command & control problems. Nobody’s been hurt, but armed uncontrolled bots seem to make people nervous for some reason. Seems that Noel Sharkey was right to be concerned about this as we reported just a few months ago.
The SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance [...]

Segway adds to its line of Robotic Mobility Platform (RMP) models with the new RMP-400 Mecanum, which was introduced at RoboBusiness 2008 on now in Pittsburgh.
The mecanum wheels allow smooth movement in any direction. The device will sell for about $50,000, carry about 400 lbs and find a productive life in warehouses and the like. [...]

One Noel Sharkey Professor of AI and Robotics at the University of Sheffield, and someone who should know something about the topic, wishes to bring those autonomous automata under the fold of legal responsibility in general, and in theaters of war in particular.
Sharkey points to the rapidly growing number of unmanned combat vehicles, aerial drones [...]

A professor of computer science over at Stanford is fed up with assembling some of Ikea’s not-so-easy-to-assemble products and is working on a solution. Andrew Ng plans to bring together a team of 30 computer scientists in order to build a robot that will be able to perform generalized tasks such as assembling an [...]

How to Survive a Robot Uprising is the title of a very funny book, an associated website, and apparently the working title of a possible robot comedy by Paramount Pictures. Author Daniel H. Wilson is a robotics specialist & doctoral candidate at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, and so should know a thing [...]