keepon

It was only a matter of time before the Crave podcast was invaded by robots. Fortunately, this week's robot overlord is the insanely adorable, soon-to-be-available My Keepon robot by BeatBots. The pint-sized dance bot is joined by its co-creator Marek Michalowski, who explains the robot's origins and its road to commercial viability.

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Robots are getting their own film festival next week in New York City, an exciting collection of shorts featuring robots exploring everything from scientific research to romance.

Slated for July 16 and 17 at Three Legged Dog theater in lower Manhattan, the inaugural Robot Film Festival will feature dozens of short films as well as a filmmaking workshop, robot entertainers, and a red-carpet awards ceremony, The Botskers.

The festival opens with Spike Jonze's 2010 romantic short "I'm Here" (see trailer below) and includes a host of new productions.

If you like getting creeped out by bots, … Read more

Here's some Craveworthy news: a toy version of the very cute, very cool dancing robot Keepon is in the works, and it will sell for only $40.

BeatBots, the firm behind the Keepon project, has teamed with Britain's Wow Stuff to develop the dance machine into a toy called My Keepon. A prototype is being shown off this week at the Nuremberg Toy Fair.

So far, the high-end, $30,000 version of Keepon, developed by Marek Michalowski and Hideki Kozima, has been used in Japan and the U.S. as a telepresence tool for autism research and therapy.

Keepon can look around with its camera eyes, bounce up and down like an excited baby, and dance to a groove. It has proved wildly endearing despite--or perhaps because of--its very simple design, lacking limbs and a mouth.

It's unclear what a $40 toy version will be able to do, but Wow says (PDF) that it aims to capture the robot's "reactivity to touch and an amazing ability to listen to music, detect the beat, and dance in perfect rhythm."… Read more

Voting is now closed for this round. See the results of these battles here and vote on the Elite Eight matchups here.

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And then there were 16.

These robots don't want to fight. That's why you have to pick the winners. After two weeks of "battling" it out, our field of nonviolent robots is down to 16 competitors.

Voting is open from now until Sept. 17. Check back then for the results of this round and vote on the Elite Eight matchups.

Voting is now closed for this round. See the results of the battles here and vote on eight more first round battles here.

Complex as they are, most robots solve dilemmas in a basic way: they fight each other. Then Michael Bay films it, charges $10 a ticket, and everyone enjoys the marvelous robots-kicking-the-crap-out-of-each-other show.

But there are plenty of robots that have no appetite for destruction. What about these robots, ones that have to rely on personality, artifical wits, social skills, and dance moves in order to survive?

Even if they banded together, these robots couldn't fight their … Read more