Robot test flight gone wrong!!! See Punk, the spiked robot from my ‘Dot Robot’ books trash my kitchen! More info: www.jasonbradbury.com
Video Rating: 4 / 5

Now, I’ve only read a little bit of Asimov, but as an occasional sci-fi fan, I certainly acknowledge him to be one of the founding fathers of the genre. His ideas about robots have actually shaped and informed robot research for decades, which I think is one of the marks of a great sci-fi writers. Now, as you may know, Asimov died in 1992. The Robot series, as it is known, was written primarily in the 40s. Now, if Asimov had wanted more Robot stories written, don’t you think he would have done so himself?

But Asimov’s estate, apparently concerned more for the bottom line than the man’s literary legacy, has authorized a new trilogy: sequels to the Robot series, to be written by a guy I’ve never heard of, a Mr. Mickey Zucker Reichert. Classy.

Now, I understand if you want to allow, say, a crappy movie to be made — it provides exposure, introduces some younger people to Asimov, and so on. And I’d be thrilled if they wanted to do a big “75th anniversary” thing or whatever, and do a big promotion, and re-issue the book all nice. But authorizing new content to be added? I don’t think he’d approve.

[via Slashdot]

We covered them all: Teaching robots, kissing robots, space robots, modeling robots and even sensitive robots. But Ninomiya-kun, a book-reading robot, is a new one. He might get along well with Booktime, a page-turning robot (just saying). And needless to say, all of these robots are Japanese.

Ninomiya-kun doesn’t read e-books, but those physical, paper-printed books. Standing 1m tall (weight: 25kg), he was showcased yesterday for the first time at a robot show in Southern Japan. The robot was jointly developed by two Japanese and one Chinese university.

Ninomiya-kun is able to read through a character recognition software installed on a PC that he carries in his backpack. His two camera eyes look at a book page and a voice synthesizer turns the text he “reads” into spoken language.

The robot is able to distinguish about 2,300 Japanese characters, which is the minimum amount the national school system expects Japanese people to learn at school.

Via Yomiuri Online [JP]