Video Top Ten: Robots

1. Qrio – the all-dancing bipedal robot

Qrio – short for quest for curiosity – is Sony's 58-centimetre-tall, all-dancing, bipedal humanoid robot. Qrio is famous for such feats as conducting the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in a unique rendition of Beethoven's 5th symphony, navigating an assault course, and even roller-skating.

See footage of four QRIOs performing a complicated dance routine, (Windows Media Player required) recorded in December 2003.
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License Plate Tracking for All

July 25, 2006

Jealous lovers may soon have an alternative to sniffing for perfume to catch a cheating mate: Just follow their license plate.

In recent years, police around the country have started to use powerful infrared cameras to read plates and catch carjackers and ticket scofflaws. But the technology will soon migrate into the private sector, and morph into a tool for tracking individual motorists' movements, says former policeman Andy Bucholz, who's on the board of Virginia-based G2 Tactics, a manufacturer of the technology.

Bucholz, who designed some of the first mobile license plate reading, or LPR, equipment, gave a presentation at the 2006 National Institute of Justice conference here last week laying out a vision of the future in which LPR does everything from helping insurance companies find missing cars to letting retail chains chart customer migrations. It could also let a nosy citizen with enough cash find out if the mayor is having an affair, he says.
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Meet the Remote-Control Self

July 20, 2006

KYOTO, Japan -- Hiroshi Ishiguro is a busy man. Between his two jobs, countless meetings and presentations, his demanding schedule was eating up all his time. So he built an android version of himself to pick up the slack.

Ishiguro, a senior researcher at ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories outside Kyoto, has created a machine in his own image -- a robot that looks and moves exactly like him. It sits on a chair and gazes around the room in a very humanlike fashion, just like its creator. In fact, the robot is an exact duplicate.

Ishiguro's silicone-and-steel doppelgänger was made from casts taken from his own body. Powered by pressurized air and small actuators, it runs on semiautonomous motion programs.

It blinks and fidgets in its seat, moving its foot up and down restlessly, its shoulders rising gently as though it were breathing. These micromovements are so convincing that it's hard to believe this is a machine -- it seems more like a man wearing a rubber mask. But a living, breathing man.
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Draft Administrative Order on data retention in Denmark

July 19, 2006

The long awaited draft administrative order on data retention in Denmark is now public. The draft, which implements the data retention provisions in the anti-terrorism law of June 2002, is currently submitted to a group of telecoms, business associations, NGOs, and public authorities for consultations with deadline on 10 August 2006.

The proposal drafted by the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Science & Technology, with the advice of a small group of telecom representatives, is more limited in scope than the previous draft of Spring 2004. The proposal implements part of the recent EU data retention directive but is more invasive, since it includes Internet session data.
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Is RFID tracking you?

july 10, 2006

RFID sounds futuristic: A transmitter smaller than a dime embedded in everything from a T-shirt to human skin, communicating data over a short distance to a reading device.

The technology has been around for decades -- the British used it to identify aircraft as friend or foe during World War II, and factory warehouses have used it more recently to make shipping more efficient.

So why is it getting so much attention now? The short answer is that RFID has moved into more common corners of society.
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Globalists created Wahhabi Terrorism to Destroy Islam and Justify a Global State

July 19, 2006

Following the dictates of Hegelian dialectic, the Globalists have created two antagonizing forces, the "Liberal-Democratic" West, against Terrorism, or "political Islam", to force us into the acceptance of their final alternative, a New World Order.

The West and Islam have had a long era of compatibility, but this history has been denied to foster the myth of a "Clash of Civilizations". In order to inflame the sentiments of the West against Islam, our attention has been focused on the specter of fanatical Wahhabism, and more specifically, its most notorious exponent, Osama bin Laden.

However, as outlined in an excellent article by Peter Goodgame, The Globalists and the Islamists, the Globalists have had a hand in shaping and financing all the terrorist organizations of the twentieth century, including the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, Hamas of Palestine and the Afghan Mujahideen. But the history of their duplicity dates farther back still, to the 18th Century, when British Freemasons created the Wahhabi sect of Saudi Arabia itself, to further their imperialistic objectives.
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Dare Violate a Copyright in Hong Kong? A Boy Scout May Be Watching Online

July 18, 2006

Movie and song copiers beware: use an Internet discussion site in Hong Kong to violate copyrights and you may be turned in to law enforcement authorities by an 11-year-old Boy Scout.

Starting this summer the Hong Kong government plans to have 200,000 youths search Internet discussion sites for illegal copies of copyrighted songs and movies, and report them to the authorities. The campaign has delighted the entertainment industry, but prompted misgivings among some civil liberties advocates.
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Scientists to build 'brain box'

July 17, 2006

A new type of computer that mimics the complex interactions in the human brain is being built by UK scientists.
The £1m machine, nicknamed the "brain box", will be constructed at the University of Manchester.

The first of its kind in the world, it will be used to help researchers engineer fail-safe electronics.

Professor Steve Furber, of the university school of computer science, said computer science had much to learn from biological systems.

"Our brains keep working despite frequent failures of their component neurons, and this 'fault-tolerant' characteristic is of great interest to engineers who wish to make computers more reliable," he explained.
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Have a big music collection? Try organizing it by feeling.

July 19, 2006

The more music you have, the tougher it can be to find the right song. Researchers at the University of Munich in Germany think they have a solution: a digital music player that maps songs by mood.
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Do you think your high-paid managers really know best?

July 18, 2006

The professor, Chris Snijders of the Eindhoven University of Technology, has been studying the routine decisions that managers make, and is convinced that computer models, by and large, can do a better job of it. He even issued a challenge late last year to any company willing to pit its humans against his algorithms.

“As long as you have some history and some quantifiable data from past experiences,” Mr. Snijders claims, a simple formula will soon outperform a professional’s decision-making skills. “It’s not just pie in the sky,” he said. “I have the data to support this.”
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Closing the circle

Jul 13th 2006

THE industrial revolution began with the automation of the textile industry, but never quite managed to finish what it started. Despite advances in the spinning of thread and the weaving and cutting of cloth that have been made in the past 250 years, almost all garments are still assembled and stitched together by hand.

Partly, that is because hands have remained cheap in some places and the cost of transporting their products has dropped enormously. Partly, though, it is because designing automated replacements for human tailors is hard. But a group of European firms and research organisations hopes to change that. Collaborating under the banner of the Leapfrog project, they are trying to complete the process begun in the 18th century by James Hargreaves and his Spinning Jenny, and they hope to have a pilot production line ready by this time next year.
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Brainy Robots Start Stepping Into Daily Life

July 18, 2006

Robot cars drive themselves across the desert, electronic eyes perform lifeguard duty in swimming pools and virtual enemies with humanlike behavior battle video game players.

These are some fruits of the research field known as artificial intelligence, where reality is finally catching up to the science-fiction hype. A half-century after the term was coined, both scientists and engineers say they are making rapid progress in simulating the human brain, and their work is finding its way into a new wave of real-world products.
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Precise Biometrics receives license order for five million passports

July 17, 2006

Swedish company Precise Biometrics has won a procurement contract for its Match-on-Card fingerprint biometric technology that will be integrated on some five million passports. Precise is part of the consortium that was issued the job for the passports that will be deployed later this year.
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In vitro cultured meat: no cows needed

January 20, 2006

He can do it. The technology exists. He can assemble the team of scientists who can make it happen, probably within the next five years. But nobody wants it badly enough to put up the millions of dollars in venture capital Vladimir Mironov, M.D., says it will take to produce in vitro cultured meat. That’s meat that never did moo, baa, oink, cluck or quack. It never chewed a cud or pecked the ground, and it certainly never experienced the horrors of a slaughterhouse. It’s edible, nutritious meat grown in a laboratory with the potential to feed the world’s hungry, to open long distance space travel by making in-flight food production a reality, and to ensure a national food supply safe from bioterrorism.
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Virtual reality gaming system tests for telepathy

July 17, 2006

The system, which immerses an individual in what looks like a life-size computer game, has been created as part of a joint project between The University's School of Computer Science and School of Psychological Sciences.

Approximately 100 participants will take part in the experiment which aims to test whether telepathy exists between individuals using the system. The project will also look at how telepathic abilities may vary depending on the relationships which exist between participants.
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AI Reaches the Golden Years

July 17, 2006

Artificial intelligence is 50 years old this summer, and while computers can beat the world's best chess players, we still can't get them to think like a 4-year-old.

This week in Boston, some of the field's leading practitioners are gathering to examine this most ambitious of computer research fields, which at once has managed to exceed, and fall short of, our grandest expectations.

"Artificial intelligence has accomplished more than people realize," said futurist Ray Kurzweil. "It permeates our economic infrastructure. Every time you place a cell phone call, send an e-mail, AI programs are directing information."
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Cheaper MEMS Microphones

July 14, 2006

Microprocessors and memory chips have been shrinking, as their performance has increased. But, for the most part, microphone technology has lagged behind. Now a Pittsburgh-based company, Akustica, is helping to bring those devices up to speed, too, by building microphones directly into integrated circuits, using a process that's almost identical to the way chip makers mass-produce microprocessors.
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Giving robots perception

July 14, 2006

We are sitting in a soccer stadium and discover our neighbor sitting in the 10th row. We recognize him with no difficulty at all, even though he is wearing sunglasses and a cap in his club colors. Complex recognition processes like this work because the brain, sensory organs and nerve pathways are able to pick up stimuli and process them. The ability to classify things (categorization) appears to be a fundamental characteristic of human intelligence, and one that gives robots a real "headache". In situations in which a robot has no access to knowledge of a pre-defined environment, and pre-programmed control is therefore not possible, the robot will tend to fail miserably in its task. But it is precisely autonomous robots capable of acting in response to a given situation that could be of great use to humans.
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Little Bird helicopter flies unmanned for first time

July 13, 2006

Just three months ago we wrote about the AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopter demonstrating the ability to control an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) weapon payload using the Unmanned Little Bird (ULB) UAV technology demonstrator as the remote vehicle. Now the Little Bird has achieved a major milestone in its development by flying unmanned for the first time. The payload for the first unmanned flight weighed 740 pounds, but could have carried an additional 550 pounds of payload. A more advanced configuration, which is expected to make its first flight later this summer, adds an additional 800 pounds of payload. Add all that up and the weapon payload could be as great as 2000 pounds, flown autonomously while its payload or sensor is guided from a remote site or another platform. We suddenly see a future of battlefields with flocks of warbirds, all networked, armed and very, very dangerous ... and not a pilot in sight!
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'Let's track paedos with chip implants' - top cop fails tech test

July 16, 2006

Britain's most senior policeman has, according to a Sunday Times report, suggested that surgically implanted chips could be used in order to track the movements of paedophiles and dangerous sex offenders. "If we are prepared to track cars, why don’t we track people?
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Northrop to sell laser shield 'bubble' for airports

July 12, 2006

Northrop Grumman forecast Wednesday a potential "very large" market for a laser-based system it has developed to shield airports and other installations from rockets, ballistic missiles and other threats.

Los Angeles-based Northrop (Charts) said it had already pitched the system, called Skyguard, to Israel, which worked with the company and the Army to develop the technology.

Northrop also is pushing Skyguard - described as capable of generating a shield five kilometers in radius - to each of the armed services and the Department of Homeland Security, company executives told a news briefing.
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Marvin Minsky on Common Sense and Computers That Emote

July 13, 2006

Top computer scientists from around the world are meeting today at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, to mark the 50th anniversary of "artificial intelligence." Back in 1956, John McCarthy, then a member of Dartmouth's mathematics faculty, invented the term for the field's seminal gathering, the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. McCarthy and four other participants in the 1956 project, including MIT's Marvin Minsky, are participating in this week's meeting, which focuses on AI's next 50 years.

Mathematical and philosophical breakthroughs by Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, and other giants of computer science made the 1950s a time of great optimism about machine intelligence. Researchers believed they would soon be able to program computers to simulate many forms of human reasoning. Expert systems would embody and manipulate knowledge in the form of symbolic logic. Artificial neural networks would be trained to evolve toward correct answers.
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Making factories and computers with DNA

June 21, 2006

As if the blueprint for life wasn't busy enough, nanotech researchers are putting DNA to work in tiny mechanical devices and as templates for electronic circuits.

Recent DNA constructions include microscopic patterns, tiny gears and a molecular assembly line. Although still mostly at the demonstration level, DNA nanotech is a rapidly growing field.
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Computers 'set to read our minds'

June 26, 2006

An "emotionally aware" computer system designed to read people's minds by analysing expressions will be featured at a major London exhibition.

Visitors to the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition are being invited to help "train" the computer how to read joy, anger and other expressions.

Its designers say there are potential commercial uses, such as picking the right time to sell someone something.
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Paralyzed man masters thought control

July 12, 2006

A paralyzed man using a new brain sensor has been able to move a computer cursor, open e-mail and control a robotic device simply by thinking about doing it, a team of scientists said Wednesday.
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Genetically Engineered Crops May Produce Herbicide Inside Our Intestines

Pioneer Hi-Bred’s website boasts that their genetically modified (GM) Liberty Link[1] corn survives doses of Liberty herbicide, which would normally kill corn. The reason, they say, is that the herbicide becomes “inactive in the corn plant.”[2] They fail to reveal, however, that after you eat the GM corn, some inactive herbicide may become reactivated inside your gut and cause a toxic reaction. In addition, a gene that was inserted into the corn might transfer into the DNA of your gut bacteria, producing long-term effects. These are just a couple of the many potential side-effects of GM crops that critics say put the public at risk.
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A microbiologist discovers our planet is hard-wired with electricity-producing bacteria

July 10, 2006

When Yuri Gorby discovered that a microbe which transforms toxic metals can sprout tiny electrically conductive wires from its cell membrane, he reasoned this anatomical oddity and its metal-changing physiology must be related.

A colleague who had heard Gorby’s presentation at a scientific meeting later reported that he, too, was able to coax nanowires from another so-called metal-reducing bacteria species and further suggested the wires, called pili, could be used to bioengineer electrical devices.

It now turns out that not only are the wires and their ability to alter metal connected—but that many other bacteria, including species involved in fermentation and photosynthesis, can also form wires under a variety of environmental conditions.
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Indian-born scientist developing coated DVD's that can make hard disks obsolete

July 8, 2006

An Indian born scientist in the US is working on developing DVD's which can be coated with a light -sensitive protein and can store up to 50 terabytes (about 50,000 gigabytes) of data.

Professor V Renugopalakrishnan of the Harvard Medical School in Boston has claimed to have developed a layer of protein made from tiny genetically altered microbe proteins which could store enough data to make computer hard disks almost obsolete.
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This Is a Computer on Your Brain

July 12, 2006

A new brain-computer-interface technology could turn our brains into automatic image-identifying machines that operate faster than human consciousness.

Researchers at Columbia University are combining the processing power of the human brain with computer vision to develop a novel device that will allow people to search through images ten times faster than they can on their own.

Darpa, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is funding research into the system with hopes of making federal agents' jobs easier. The technology would allow hours of footage to be very quickly processed, so security officers could identify terrorists or other criminals caught on surveillance video much more efficiently.
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Technology Design or Evolution?

July 11, 2006

Many of the most interesting problems in computer science, nano-technology, and synthetic biology require the construction of complex systems. But how would we build a really complex system -- such as a general artificial intelligence (AI) that exceeded human intelligence?

Some technologists advocate design; others prefer evolutionary search algorithms. Still others would conflate the two, hoping to incorporate the best of both while avoiding their limitations. But while both processes are powerful, they are very different and not easily combined. Rather, they present divergent paths.

Designed systems offer predictability, efficiency, and control. Their subsystems are easily understood, which allows their reuse in different contexts. But designed systems also tend to break easily, and they have conquered only simple problems so far. Compare, for example, Microsoft code and biological code: Word is larger than the human genome.
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Nanowires in the Brain

July 11, 2006

To treat severe cases of Parkinson's disease, surgeons implant electrodes deep in the brain, where they deliver high-frequency electrical pulses that shut down neural systems responsible for the disease's characteristic tremors. But this expensive treatment, called deep brain stimulation, is risky: the patient's skull must be opened, and the electrodes can damage blood vessels in the brain.
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Engineering Biology

July 11, 2006

Synthetic biology seeks to design and construct biological components that can be modeled, understood, tuned to meet specific criteria, and assembled into larger integrated systems that solve specific problems. Such capabilities could transform biology in the way that integrated-circuit design transformed computing. Researchers could redesign enzymes, genetic circuits, and cells to their specifications, or even build biological systems from scratch.

Scientists have already made significant strides toward engineering microörganisms that produce ethanol, bulk chemicals, and drugs from inexpensive starting materials (see "From the Labs"). The work has been slow, however, in large part because engineers lack the tools to easily and predictably reprogram existing systems, let alone build new ones.
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Artificial sperm create viable progeny

July 11, 2006

Scientists have demonstrated for the first time that embryonic stem (ES) cells cultured in the laboratory can produce sperm with the capacity to produce viable offspring. The research, published in the July issue of Developmental Cell, opens many exciting avenues for future studies, including investigation of mechanisms involved in sperm production and development of new treatment strategies for infertility.

Previous studies have shown that ES cells grown in the laboratory can differentiate into primordial germ cells that then give rise to cells resembling mature egg and sperm cells, known as gametes. However, the functionality of the gametes has not been thoroughly tested and many questions about the viability of these cells remain unanswered. Dr. Karim Nayernia and Dr. Wolfgang Engel from the Institute of Human Genetics at the University of Goettingen in Goettingen, Germany and colleagues developed a new strategy for generating mature sperm cells in the laboratory using ES cells from mice and went on to test the functionality of the ES-derived sperm.
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NASA to use Space Age 'droid' satellites

July 11, 2006

NASA scientists say they are ready to test "smart" satellites that can fly in precision formation and are relatively inexpensive to make and operate.

David Miller, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Space Systems Laboratory, says such satellites might be used for such tasks as building giant space telescopes and closely monitoring Earth.
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New French copyright law gives Apple satisfaction

July 5, 2006

as finally adopted in the French Parliament with a compromise allowing Apple to continue operating as before.

The law was adopted by the Parliament under emergency regime, which ended with a mixed commission, normally made of 7 senators and 7 deputies, from both the majority and the opposition. But the opposition left the commission, after 55 more amendments were brought to it by the rapporteurs at the very final step

The most controversial provision was that of interoperability. In a previous draft, the law imposed measures to allow interoperability, obliging thus Apple to give up its DRM system that made "iTunes" products strictly related to i-Pods.

Apple reacted virulently, accusing of "state sponsored piracy" and threatening to leave France altogether in case the law was passed as such.
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German experts think search engines should be monitored

July 5, 2006

During the workshop "The Rising Power of Search-Engines on the Internet: Impacts on Users, Media Policy, and Media Business" that took place in Berlin on 26-27 June 2006, the experts expressed the opinion that the search engines should be more regulated.

Marcel Machill, a lecturer in journalism at Germany's Leipzig and Dortmund universities stated that Google along with Yahoo and MSN were the main source of information searches for 90% of the Germans, Google alone accounting for 70%. He expressed serious concern related to the power of the search engines that would be unconceivable in the classic media. Machill as well as other experts considers Google should have the same responsibility as other publishers not to allow access to illegal sites, such as those with neo-Nazi content or x-rated ones and that mechanisms must be created to protect children online and to address illegal content.
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ABC Wants DVR Fast Forwarding Disabled

Jul 6, 2006

ABC HAS HELD DISCUSSIONS ON the use of technology that would disable the fast-forward button on DVRs, according to ABC President of Advertising Sales Mike Shaw, with the primary goal to allow TV commercials to run as intended.

"I would love it if the MSOs, during the deployment of the new DVRs they're putting out there, would disable the fast-forward [button]," Shaw said.

While MSOs risk losing some of their DVR customers if fast-forwarding were blocked, Shaw said the cable operators--who are beefing up their own local ad sales operations--"are in the same business we're in." "They've got to sell ads too," he said. "So if everybody's skipping everybody's ads, that's not a long-term business model for them either."
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Terrorist Finance Tracking Program raises privacy questions

5 July, 2006

On 22-23 June 2006, the New York Times published a story uncovering an international financial surveillance programme, called Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, run by the US authorities. After the 11 September 2001 attacks, the US Treasury Department and/or CIA starting getting access to international transfer data, available in the SWIFT database, in order to investigate terrorist activity.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is a Belgian-based industry-owned co-operative that supplies a messaging infrastructure to the global banking community. This 'community' consists of banks, brokers and dealers, investment managers and their market infrastructures in payments, securities, treasury and trade. SWIFT provides messaging services and interface software to more than 7,863 financial institutions in 204 countries and territories.
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Self-Powered Silicon Laser Chips

July 06, 2006

A computer scientist at UCLA has transformed one power-hungry component of a silicon laser into a generator of energy -- which could help engineers trying to incorporate faster optical elements into commercial processors.

"Not only are we not dumping energy in, we're actually recovering it," says Bahram Jalali, a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science "It sounds too good to be true, but it is true."

As computer chip makers pack more and more transistors onto a silicon chip, they're running into a fundamental limit: how much data they can push out of the chip, or from one motherboard to another, over copper wires. As they increase the power and amount of data, electrical resistance builds up -- until the wires hit their speed limit.
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Moving Paper Parts for Robots

July 07, 2006

Researchers at Inha University in South Korea have demonstrated that cellulose, the main ingredient in paper, can bend in response to electricity. The treated cellulose is lightweight, inexpensive, and has low power requirements, compared with similar electrically active materials.

The Korean researchers are now working with NASA to develop insect-sized, wirelessly powered flying vehicles with flapping paper wings. Such vehicles could fly into areas unsafe for humans and test for hazardous gases -- or survey the surface of Mars from the air.
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Keeping Synthetic Biology Away from Terrorists

July 06, 2006

Synthetic biology is the attempt to design novel biological devices to improve life, such as bacteria that can produce energy or drugs cheaply or new biological therapies. But the field also has a potential dark side.

Scientists can order expressly designed chunks of DNA from a number of DNA synthesis companies around the world and then fuse these bits together to create new biological "parts." And the same technology that could lead to valuable inventions can also be used to make deadly bioweapons -- hypothetically, terrorists could order DNA to recreate the smallpox virus or design an even more deadly pathogen. While most experts doubt that fringe groups currently have the ability to pull off such a feat of biological engineering (see "The Knowledge"), scientists worry that, as DNA synthesis technologies quickly become cheaper and more accessible, the possibility of nefarious use will grow.
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Catching Seizures Before They Occur

July 06, 2006

Researchers at MIT and Harvard are preparing to carry out trials of a new device for treating epilepsy. If successful, it would be the first such device to automatically detect and treat seizures, says John Guttag, at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, who developed it with colleague Ali Shoeb and Steven Schachter, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School, in Boston.

Currently, more than two million people in the United States alone have epilepsy. And globally it affects one in every 100 people. While about half of them are able to treat the condition with drug therapies, many others fight a constant battle to find the right drugs to target their condition. And, for many sufferers, such as those whose epilepsy is caused by trauma to the brain, drugs are not an option.

Guttag is working on a technological alternative that involves implanting a pacemaker-like device in the patient's chest. Connected to the device is an electrode that wraps around the vagus nerve, a large nerve that runs down from the brainstem through the neck and into the abdomen. This vagal nerve stimulator (VNS) has two modes, says Guttag. One stimulates the nerve electrically at regular intervals. "There is some evidence that this periodic stimulation has a long-term prophylactic effect," he says. But this is hit or miss.
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Men to lose battle with robots

July 6, 2006

BT's crystal ball-gazer-in-chief is warning that machine intelligence is going to make men redundant over the next 10 or 20 years.

Ian Pearson, resplendent in the job title Futurologist, says machine intelligence is going to take over many traditionally male jobs, that is "jobs that require intellect", such as programming. These jobs will be automated, he says, leaving the male workforce without a cranial hemisphere to, er, stand on.
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The self-driving Golf that would give Herbie a run for its money

30 June, 2006

It has proved one of the most endearing of cinematic legends - a loveable car with a mind of its own that can drive itself.

And for 40 years Herbie - or the 'Love Bug' - as the Volkswagen Beetle was dubbed in its first movie outing - has enthralled millions of families in a series of Hollywood sequels.

But now German car giant Volkswagen has turned fiction into reality by unveiling a fully automatic car which really can drive itself - and at speeds of up to 150mph.
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Hyperactive Bob Fast Food Management Robot

Hyperactive Bob, the kitchen production management computer system from Hyperactive Technologies, is now being licensed to Zaxby's, a fast-food restaurant chain with locations in the Southern states. Zaxby's has 330 counter-service chicken specialty restaurants. This artificially intelligent computer system not only takes orders, it gives them as well.
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