An article appearing in November’s issue of the IEEE Spectrum (a magazine written by and for electrical engineers), asks the question, “Why do toddlers love robots?”. The answer, it seems, lies not in their cute and fuzzy appearance, but more in their ability to be unpredictable and resond to interaction. To arrive at this conclusion, a Sony Qrio robot was placed in the company of a group of 10 – 24 month old children, and the children were observed to see how interested they were in the robot. “The researchers found that the key to Qrio’s popularity was its ability to move and respond to the children in a way that was closely timed to the activity around it.”

The research is being done by Fumihide Tanaka as part of a project seeking to develop robotic teacher’s assistants (I’m going to ignore just how scary this sounds). Researchers found that since the children were very young, responding to emotions was moe important that mimicing true human behavior. They also found that if Qrio’s behaviors were limited and predictable, the once oh-so-popular robotic playmate was soon discarded.

What if mankind evacuated Earth and forgot to turn off the last remaining robot?

This is the premise of Pixar Studio’s latest film, Wall-E, to be relased this coming summer.

Even though Lem beat me to it, I’ve been meaning to post about Wall-E ever since my wife and I saw the trailer in front of another Pixar film, Ratatouille. The film is directed by Andrew Stanton, the writer and director of Pixar’s earlier smash hit, Finding Nemo, and features, as its main character, a robot named Wall-E.

Wall-E is a robot designed to clean up the trash caused by humans, but when the humans leave earth to find a better planet, Wall-E is left behind – for 700 years. When the humans (and robots) finally return, Wall-E falls in love with a robot named Eve, who is sent on a probe to check on the status of Earth. Not surprisingly, Eve doesn’t return his feelings.

In designing the robots, director Stanton told his designers to model them after appliances. Also interesting is that this movie will not feature voice actors, but instead have sound effects that sound like voices. This should be interesting to see if it can still capture the audience’s imagination. The sound design will be done by Ben Burtt, who created many of the sounds for droids in the Star Wars movie.

Of all the recent films about robots, this one might have me the most excited. Pixar does good work and I’m anxious to see what comes of it. Besides, you just can’t beat Wall-E in the cuteness department, and because of this, there’s even a Wall-E builder’s group for the serious fans. If you build one, how about sending us your pictures?

Check out the trailer after the jump.

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The world for terrorists and evil-doers just keeps getting scaier and scaier. First it was Predator drones with helfire missiles , then it was PackBots that can fire at 1,000,000 rounds/minute (more on this later), and now it’s tiny flying vehicles with on-board cameras. Oh, did I mention they’re tiny? The WIRED: Danger Room reports that a group from the Netherlands, the Delft University of Technology, has created these tiny insectocopters with a 25cm wingspan, and are currently working on making them even smaller.

Currently, the DelFly II, fits in a 30cm sphere and can fly at a rate of 15m/seconds, in addition to being able to hover, and fly in reverse.

The DelFly II can fly for 15 minutes and hover for 8. What’s more amazing is that it also has streaming video. There more videos and images on the DelFly website. We’ve also posted some after the jump.

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