If you have $4,000 you might be able to afford a brand new pal, the Hello Kitty robot! She’s capable of carrying 20,000 conversations, shows emotions through arm gestures, and uses her little-bitty robot eyes to recognize your face and up to nine other faces as well…do you remember the episode of the X-Files when extraterrestrials sent robot cockroaches to spy on us?

No, Hello Kitty is way too cute to be a spy, but she could be your new BFF come November 1st.

I can just imagine the conversation with my wife, as I try to convince her to let me by this RC2 V_Bot for our terribly misbehaving son. "But honey, look! It’s three toys in one! It morphs into a car, a Transformer, and a speaker station! I mean, come on, how much cooler could it be?" After I recovered from the wounds, given the thing’s $267 pricetag, I’d come to my senses and remember that my son hasn’t been a paragon of good behavior lately. But maybe someday!

Or, maybe, robots should look like crosses between alien abductors and cute little duckies, and serve as receptionists. At $1000 a day, that’s a pretty expensive receptionist. $25,000 a year is a little more reasonable, but here in the good ol’ US, anyways, one can easily get a receptionist for that much or less, with no maintenance fees. These little buggers are a little over 3 feet tall and 66 pounds, or about the size of my son–who probably has a better vocabulary. I’m sure, as usual, these are proofs-of-concept, but still, I want my robots to look more like Transformers than Donald the Duck from Alpha Prime.

A water-creeping creepy robot called the Stride (Surface Tension Robotic Insect Dynamic Explorer) mimics the real insect called a Stride by using hydrophobic wire legs coated with Teflon. Researchers Yun Seong Song, a PhD student in mechanical engineering, and Metin Sitti, assistant professor in mechanical engineering, both from Carnegie Mellon University, discovered that the 1-gram bot could carry a 9.3-gram payload without breaking the surface by utilizing a sculling motion for movement.

“Their power efficiency and agility (speed and maneuverability) are much superior for relatively small water vehicles since the STRIDE legs have much less drag than any buoyancy based robot.” Sitti explains.

The robot is 10-15 times slower than the actual insect and 10 times larger, but the engineers hope to lower the bot’s size and increase it’s speed.

“Therefore, we would miniaturize the STRIDE more. Moreover, we are integrating wireless communication, sensors, and teleoperated and autonomous control capability to the new STRIDE prototypes. Thus, we could deploy tens or hundreds of these robots to the water surface for environment monitoring.”

On August 7, the Endeavour will launch itself into space once again this year.  Teacher/Astronaut Christa McAuliff has been waiting 22 years for this day and will operate the shuttle’s robotic arm, transfer cargo, and even report to students at three different schools from space.  It would’ve been nice to have my science teacher teach astronomy from space.

To read the full article, go here.