Yes. It is finished. We can shut down NASA, DARPA, all the arts and sciences, and stop trying now. The pinnacle of human achievement has been reached. Robot vacuums have been hacked to play the parts in a real-life game of Pac-Man.

Video inside.

There’s not much for me to add here. In addition to walking normally, robots can now play pool, baseball, volleyball, and make ramen. Anybody else feeling a bit like an endangered species?

Seriously, who doesn’t want a pet dinosaur? Sure, Jurassic Park makes it seem all dangerous and life-threatening and such. Would you really let that stop you? I think not. But until genetics research and cloning catch up to our imaginations, we’ll have to settle for robotic proxies. And everyone’s favorite little Camarasaurus just got back on the market.

You may be familiar with the old DARPA Grand Challenge. Well, consider this the Petit Challenge. Roboticists whose favorite flavor of robot is micro are being challenged to bring it in the 2010 NIST Mobile Microbotics Challenge, or Microlympics. All contestants must be no greater than 600 micrometers (or rather, their robots must be), and they will compete in three grueling micro-events!

It’s not enough that they make ramen, juggle, and play catch — now robot arms need to play with their food? This robot arm on the right is teasing the one on the left. Want a Fanta? You can’t have one! Your feeble manipulator navigates this six-pack in vain.

I wanted to tell you guys to watch this without seeing the description, but it’s difficult to do so. Better find someone nearby, tell them to close their eyes, and then open them when they think they’ve got it figured out. This piano-based voice synthesizer breaks down the morphemes of normal speech into components which can be built up using piano keys. Sounds crazy in theory of course, but actually seeing the keys playing themselves and a voice coming out of it makes me think the end times are coming.

Nissan announced Thursday [press release in English] that it has developed robots that are able to move in a group without colliding into each other. Much like a school of fish, the so-called Eporo can also avoid obstacles standing in their way safely. Nissan claims this is the first time the world sees robots that are able to show group behavior.

Let’s see… a robot that responds to the thoughts of its master (is “master” the right word here?). Pretty sure that we (humans) will bring about our own downfall, either by blowing each other up, or by inventing a robot that says, “You guys are idiots, so we’re going to kill you.”

You’ve heard of Deep Blue, the IBM computer that bested Gary Kasparov in a chess match a decade ago. Now, there is Deep Green, a robot that plays pool. And by the looks of this demo video, it can’t lose.

As Delicious founder, and now-Googler, Joshua Schachter points out, it is “only a matter of time before one of these kills a person.”

Only a fool would pay for pornography on the Internet. It’s like, you don’t pay for air (or, more accurately, oxygen), do you? So why pay for porn? But if porn is free all over the place, what’s going to happen to our nation’s adult entertainment industry? It employs more than a few people (that’s good), and helps maintain our image abroad (that’s also good). Two good thing! So what’s the industry going to do in a world where every kid can load up uTorrent or visit YouTube-like site? One word: robots.

I hate it when the best way to state something is also the punniest. You guys remember the DARPA Grand Challenge, right? That used full-size cars with super-customized navigation systems. If you’re just an engineer trying to design better crash avoidance software, or determine traffic interactions between two models of navigation, it’s not exactly cost-effective to buy a Hummer and outfit it with $10,000 worth of gear. The solution: Robocar Z.

This cute little bugger is actually an extremely advanced standard unit for working on autonomous navigation systems.

I’m beginning to think the Robocalypse is going to be less Terminator and more Dinobot. I mean, we’ve robotic fish, dog-monsters, and hummingbots already, and that’s just off the top of my head. And if it isn’t based on an animal, it’s named after one. The BEAR robot, in contrast, isn’t actually bearlike, but is just a handy acronym for the Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot.

Ian Yeoman of the University of Wellington in New Zealand posits that we could soon be heading to charming resorts on the coast where we have rough sex with robotic pleasure bots. He writes:

“Robotics will become important, because you’re going to have labour shortages in the future,” he said…Even robot “prostitutes” that would not pass on diseases such as HIV could make an appearance.”

Looks like the Robocalypse is going to have to wait on battery technology. The Hummingbot/Hunter-seeker we saw last month has improved somewhat, and is now capable of more than falling while flapping its wings. It can, in fact, hover in a controlled fashion for up to 20 seconds. If you’re quick, that’s enough time to get it through the ducts and assassinate the Kwisatz Haderach, but I’d wait until they can get it up to a full minute.

You know how it is: you go down to your secret lair to work on the prototype for your armada of deathbots, and you get paralyzed by the sheer enormity of the project you’ve undertaken. Not only do you need to find the raw materials, you need to design the bodies and weapons systems, build in failsafes so they don’t attack you, and basically write a complete operating system from scratch. That’s a lot of work for a busy tyrant-to-be, and frankly such details distract from the big picture of global domination.

Thankfully, there’s a crew of people working to standardize and abstract robot operating systems to reduce the time-to-market for your electronic henchmen.