Since I was a child of the 80’s, there has been speculation on when the cartoon Transformers would inspire real-life robotics experts to form a transforming bot, and Carnegie Mellon, competing for the $2m DARPA prize, has constructed the CHIMP to make dreams come true.

Part of the revolutionary university’s “Tartan Rescue” program gave birth to this robot that is capable of working on all four limbs with rotating treads as a tank, or climbing vertical ladders with its adept hands and Swiss-army-like knife parts (that can pop out of its arms and legs) as an ape-like being — or CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform (CHIMP).

This is not fiction, and this is not a cartoon.

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The steadily declining bee population has caused concern among many environmental scientists. Without bees, the earth’s very ecosystem could be in peril. Since 2009, however, three scientists have been researching a way to create man-made bees that can potentially take over the job of pollinating plants should the bee population disappear.

These Robobees, as they are lovingly called, will fly and even behave to some extent like actual bees.

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Well Skynet is certainly sitting in a dimly lit server room rubbing virtual hands together, because the future of mankind and robots is going forward, in force, with Boston Dynamic’s latest version of Big Dog, which happens to be very successfully hurling cinderblocks.

Boston Dynamic’s animal-based robot, the Cheetah, based off of Ray Bradbury’s terrifying apocalyptic firemen dog already held the title for the world’s fastest bot at eighteen miles per hour. Now these Red Sox superstars have built a fierce robot for the Pentagon called, aptly, Big Dog, and it is increasingly apparent that these inventors have to be huge fans of the book and/or movie Fahrenheit 451.

Keep your books safely hidden away or the Big Dog’ll get you!

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If your grills’ cooktop looks like a botched batch of rock candy and you haven’t seen the shine of clean grates since you first purchased your grill so many summers ago, get your wallet ready for Grillbot.

Just toss Grillbot onto your grill, select light or deep clean, push the go button and this little gadget will have an average sized BBQ clean and ready to use in 5-7 minutes.

Now you can spend more time enjoying your day and less time watching your family and neighbors make funny faces when they bite into mysterious crunchy charred nuggets.

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Some day soon we’ll be printing out our own life-size humanoid robot from home printers that, with minimal assembly, can be fully animated and respond to voice commands. Oh wait – that day is here. Introducing InMoov, an animated life sized robot with human features created by French sculptor and model maker Gael Langevin.

With a little bit of a DIY attitude, a little bit of money (about $800), some time on your hands, and a 3D printer InMoov can be yours just by pressing a ‘print’ button.

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Introducing WheeMe, the ambiguously erotic robot massager that is essentially a Roomba for your sore back. The WheeMe, which is manufactured by affordable robotic toy and gift company DreamBots, uses a unique tilt senor technology and automatically steers itself all over your body to massage and caress.

The massager, which looks like a little toy car, will never fall off your back or lose it’s grip – in most cases – offering a pretty dedicated robotic massage.  WheeMe also has patented fingerettes that add a little light massaging and caressing.

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My cat is already scared of anything that is automatic or makes a loud noise. Even if the vacuum cleaner is turned off and resting against a wall somewhere in the house, she won’t go near that room until it’s gone. And when it is gone she still makes sure it’s not hiding somewhere, waiting to pounce. I couldn’t imagine what she would think of the Litter Robot – a new self-cleaning, self-sifting litter box that bears a striking resemblance to R2-D2.

One thing about owning cats is that their litter boxes can stink to high heaven. It’s one of the main reasons I wish my cat would learn to use the toilet. I can’t stand that nightmarish ammonia smell that wafts through the whole house after a fresh use of the box. Sure, cats are house broken, but it’s designated to a single box. A lot of veterinarians recommend that you get two litter boxes in your house, but that seems to be verging on obsessive.

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The only thing left on the bucket list is to see the fully armored heaviest of metal bands, Compressorhead robots rockin’ out “Ace of Spades” with Lemmy stepping in to belt out the lead vocals!

Because these bad-ass bots, not only can play, but do play live concerts where their tin necks lash as they head bang and deliver hard edged renditions of classic heavy metal hits.

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If you’re like most Americans, you’re probably too lazy to walk anywhere… let alone walk your kid to school. And in the era where wars are fought by remote control and intelligence is gained against our enemy using unmanned crafts from thousands of miles away, there is growing sense that every moment, at anytime, someone might be watching us. Now, people can build these drones in their own backyard. Meet Paul Wellich, a Vermont based robot enthusiast who built a DIY, camera-equipped arducopter to follow his kid a quarter of a mile to the bus stop that takes him to school.

Wellich probably had that same feeling we all do: not enough time to finish that cup of coffee or eggs before you rush out the door; just one of the multitudinous quagmires that are a symptom of being an adult with responsibilities. In Wellich’s case it was walking his grade-school-age son a couple hundred meters to school.

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Kogoro Kurata’s childhood dream was to grow up and take over the world. No not really, but Tokyo, Japan based artist Kurata did grow up watching an overdose inducing amount of manga and science fiction films. His father was also a blacksmith who taught him how to make lethal samurai swords and he developed a fondness for metalworking.

Kurata’s new invention is a 13 foot tall, four ton “mech” (a giant man piloted robot killing machine from the science fiction niche genre mecha which centers around robots or machines) that is also powered by an iPhone or by a pilot in a one man cockpit inside the robot’s body cavity. Oh and the robot’s artillery fires 6,000 bullets per minute when the pilot smiles – how’s that for completely demented?

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