It seems fans of golf take every precaution to not get any exercise at all when playing the “sport”. Caddys to carry your clubs, golf carts to whisk you from here to there—why is Tiger Woods considered an athlete again?

To this end, the Automatic Golf Tee holds 35 balls and automatically feeds balls onto a tee. Lower the arm with the end of your club and a single ball gets placed for you to whack. The only question is, who’s going to fetch the balls once you’ve hit them?

Automatic Golf Tee [Hammacher Schlemmer via Uber Review]
from gizmodo

In an announcement that you can probably expect to be repeated by rival Pakistan in the next few days, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has claimed that his South Asian nation will be the latest country to pursue technologies for developing a robotic army. Singh’s remarks came during the inauguration of a new building for the Defence Research and Development Organisation, and were part of a larger speech outlining the country’s future plans for military research, where he also mentioned interest in developing next-gen propulsion, camouflage, and precision guided munitions systems. Unlike South Korea’s planned army of killbots (pictured), the Indian program is pretty light on specifics so far, although we do know that the impetus for the project comes from the realization that “trans-national actors and unconventional forces” pose a growing threat when compared to the risk of a traditional inter-state conflict.

[Via Robot Gossip]
from engadget

 

Specifically built for 2005’s Burning Man event, this towering robot looms over the humans below. Click image for a full-sized verison.

[via Robots-Dreams]

From TecheBlog

 

The final version of Korea’s planned army of networked domestic robots may look nothing like this prototype, but it’s a start. The model is designed to do such mundane tasks as answering the door and playing media files. And, yes, it can connect to the net and download orders from the mothership. So don’t let that smiling face fool you. As the bard said, one can “smile and smile and be a villain.” Or in this case, a networked robot under the control of an AI managed by the government or a large corporation. As if there’s a difference.

more info

From Engadget

 

You know, we’re fairly sure there’s nothing Vstone‘s Tetsujin 28 can do that the the OMNIZERO.2 can’t, but damned if Gigantor doesn’t have a place carved out in our hearts / homes / wallets. We’ve been waiting a long time for you, Gigantor, and Vstone’s finally put it on sale (in Japan). This bigger than big, stronger than strong space-age robot — in your command or not — doesn’t come cheaply though: expect to fork out Â¥351,750 ($2980 US), a price close to what we understand the entire cartoon series cost to produce back in the 50s.

[Via Akihabara News]

More info

From Engadget

You’ve got 14 years, South Korea, to make good on your promise: 100% market penetration for robots in the home some time between 2015 and 2020. We’ll be generous and give you the later date to work with, but don’t you and your Ministry of Information and Communication go spouting off about how you’ve got goals to put a robot in every home by 2020 unless you’re dead serious, you hear us? Because we here at Engadget take our robots seriously — from Roombas to Ri-Man — so don’t go all getting our hopes up for some postmodern South Korean android utopia of intelligent networked household service bots unless you’re prepared to deliver, ok?

[Thanks, Palm Addict]

More info

From Engadget

Back in March of 2004, Akibalive.com reported about NUVO, an amazing robot from Japan that can walk and talk, and even understands you. It was originally only able to speak and understand Japanese, but now it’s capable of speaking and understanding English. Here’s an excerpt from the original post last year:

Nuvo stands 39cm high and weighs 2.5 kilograms. The robot has a built-in camera that can be controlled via your cell phone and it also accepts voice commands. The soles of the feet have rubber tracks similar to those found on sneakers, hence the cooperation from Mizuno.
Dynamism.com is now exclusively offering this amazing robot. You can get the full specs and pricing info by clicking here.
Surely the gadget freak in your familiy would like to see this sitting under the tree, right?

From akibalive.com