WowWee PR blathers:

Evolution Robotics announced strategic alliance with WowWee Robotics™ to integrate Evolution’s technologies for vision and navigation into the next generation of WowWee products.

WowWee sells four plastic uber-toys and an animatronicized Chimp’s bust - as in head and shoulders bust [hmm, the alternate meaning has my imagination furiously at work].

Add ER’s smarts to a humanoid WW critter and it could blow away their far-too successful Robo-family.

[Artiste's impression at right ~ not exactly what WowWee have in mind I suspect]

Link to EvoR PR

Greg White, executive vice president and general manager, iRobot:

Selling 2 million Roomba Vacuuming Robots is not just a milestone for iRobot, but for the robot industry as a whole

This achievement signifies that more and more consumers are adopting robots in their everyday lives, thereby liberating themselves from mundane household chores and spending more time with family and friends.

I couldn’t have said it better. Hey, why the sad face li’l fella? Oh, Packbot and that Hall of Fame stuff. Guess he wiped the floor with you, huh? Swept them off their feet.

The iRobot company is to be applauded for filling an automata vacuum :0)

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Surgical teams from the United States and around the world will learn advanced robotic and minimally invasive surgical techniques at the new $4.5-million Applebaum Surgical SuperBowl Learning Center - considered first of its kind in the world - at Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak, Michigan USA. .

Unique status derives from two mock operating rooms, one sporting an electronic interactive patient simulator to allow doctors hands-on training in medical emergencies without risking human patients (live surgery has no Ctrl-Z, and hopefully rarely blue-screens), in the other surgeons train with a da Vinci robot for procedures that are less invasive and allow faster recovery than conventional surgery.

 Enjoy the slide show!

PS: Seeing ‘cutting-edge’ [I love that cliche applied to surgery's best] surgical environs like Beaumont’s, then fast-forwarding to Star Trek’s minimalist ’sick bay, one ponders if that’s where trauma or remedial medicine will be a century hence. In particular, might it parallel ST’s Voyager’s medbay, where the resident was virtual.

The point of this is to ponder the technology - yet uninvented - for ultimate non-invasive diagnosis, surgery and recuperation. Like - additional to medical tricorders - distance-swarming nanobots, holistic-field induction, or 5-dimensional perceptive emitters … I dunno, you make some up.

Not quite

Immodest hyperbole, it transpired, touting pattern recognition for your cell that enables pointing it’s camera at a magazine so one can .. err, get a new cell by merely photographing a magazine advert. [Thinks: Such grand concepts so quickly demeaned by commercial imperative]

Bandai Networks Co. Ltd is using Evolution Robotics’ ViPR(TM) visual pattern recognition technology in their "Search by Camera! ER Search" (ER Search) mobile phone service. Jointly developed by Bandai Networks and D2 Communications, Inc. Till now cross-media marketing (mobile devices plus magazine, product packaging and/or outdoor ads) was limited to little more than SMS or predictable patterns.

Link to EvoR PR