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In the Universal Century, we suppose this sort of thing will be rather blasé. But until then, there’s really no better way to get our geek hearts a-flutter than some up close and personal pics of this 1:1 scale model of the classic RX-78-2 Gundam mecha, built to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the franchise. We’ve been watching the construction of this thing rather closely and we’re proud to announce that the finished product is every bit as badass as we’d hoped. If you’re not planning on making the trip to Tokyo any time soon, feel free to take a gander at the thing in the gallery below. And our thanks to blogger Punynari for the awesome pics!

Gallery: Life-sized Gundam

[Via Examiner]

Filed under: Robots

Life-sized Gundam complete and no, you can’t borrow it originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Let’s face it: Father’s Day has esteem issues. First proposed in the U.S. in 1909 as a counterpart to Mother’s Day, it was only officially recognized by Richard Nixon in 1972.

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Cisco’s PVC300 Pan Tilt Optical Zoom Internet Camera provides real-time video monitoring from any Internet-enabled PC or mobile phone Cisco’s new PVC300 Pan Tilt Optical Zoom Internet Camera provides a suite of surveillance features aimed at small companies who want to keep a watchful eye on their employees and business property.

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Within hours of General Motors filing for bankruptcy, the U.S. and Canadian governments announced billions in new funding to bail out the troubled automaker.

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Volleyball-playing robots may only come around every ten years or so, but they at least bring along some fairly big improvements when they do show up — like actual mobility, in this case. Of course, “volleyball-playing” is still a bit of a stretch. The bot is actually designed to be more of a training aid, with it making use of a range of sensors, built-in GPS, a compass, and an iSight camera (all linked to a Mac mini) to track down balls and set them up for spiking drills. As you can see in the unfortunately short video after the break, all of that more or less works as advertised, although it seems that we’ll still have to wait quite a while for the inevitable robot vs. robot match.

Continue reading Volleyball-playing robot has Mac mini brain, heart of a champion

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Volleyball-playing robot has Mac mini brain, heart of a champion originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 May 2009 17:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Lexus has renewed its deal with Oxfordshire-based Retail Active to continue mystery shops to monitor quality and brand standards at its 52 showrooms in the UK.

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WEYBRIDGE, UNITED KINGDOM – June 4, 2009: Kia Motors (UK) Limited has announced that Michael Cole has been appointed to the role of Managing Director. He will take up the position in early August replacing Paul Philpott who has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer at Kia Motors Europe.

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AceShowbiz

Marie Digby's Music Video for 'Feel' Released AceShowbiz Marie Digby has debuted a music video to promote her new song called 'Feel', which is taken from new album 'Breathing Underwater'. An official music video aimed to serve as a Japanese promotional effort for Marie Digby's new song "Feel" has just been …

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Japanese electronic retailers jumped on reports of strong homeappliance sales.

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Robots won’t be able to wrest control of the planet from us silly humans until they learn how to collaborate. Sure, they can mow the lawn or mix a drink, but only when you give ‘em explicit instructions. Luckily for our future robot overlords, The EU’s JAST project is studying the ways that humans work together, in the hope that it can someday teach robots to anticipate the actions and intentions of a human partner. “In our experiments the robot is not observing to learn a task,” explains Wolfram Erlhagen from the University of Minho. “The JAST robots already know the task, but they observe behavior, map it against the task, and quickly learn to anticipate [partner actions] or spot errors when the partner does not follow the correct or expected procedure.” This bad boy has a neural architecture that mimics what happens when two people interact, and the video below shows the rather melancholy automaton trying to convince his human partner to pick up the right pieces to complete a simple task. Watch it in action after the break.

Continue reading Researchers develop a robot that reads your intentions, says you’re ‘thick’

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Researchers develop a robot that reads your intentions, says you’re ‘thick’ originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Jun 2009 07:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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