A review of the best robots of 2009

This article's closing text also references the intriguing term describing our emotional/psychological response range to humanoid robots, the Uncanny Valley:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley</a><p>I'm now curious of my own reaction if had a life-life robot right in front of me. There's a great line from the movie A.I. where Gigolo Joe's character (a robot) asks rhetorically, "Do you know why they hate us? It's because they made us too smart, and immortal."

&#62; The dry adhesive technique uses micro-hairs and <i>intramolecular (van der waals) forces</i> to stick bot to wall.<p>It doesn't change the article much, but something went wrong there. Journalists, check what the keywords mean!

At the risk of beating a dead horse,<p>I think we could be making much more advances in robotics if we dispense of the notion that robots should be bipedal and look like humans.

The video of the Quattro s650, claimed as the world's fastest packing/sorting robot, is particularly impressive as it handles a surprisingly large variety of objects.