New Scientist article identifies two projects currently under development by Foster-Miller and iRobot that will enable their previous robot models Talon and Packbot, which were designed for defensive roles, to carry weapons. Both projects are currently human controlled and do not operate autonomously.

The article also notes that ”A research request issued in August by the Pentagon’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) shows that military robots are one day going to be asked to make some important decisions on their own. The ONR wants to engineer mobile robots to “understand cooperative and uncooperative” people, and inform their operator if they seem a threat. It hopes to do this using artificial intelligence software fed with data from a “remote physiological stress monitoring” system, and by using speech, face and gesture recognition. From this it would draw inferences about the threat that person poses.”

Source: New Scientist (subscription required)

Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot is interviewed in Forbes:

Our true mission is to make homes that can take care of themselves. It’s imperative that our aging population be able to live independently for more years than they currently do.

Andrew Sullivan quotes George Orwell on “alternative interrogation techniques” - “Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness…” .

So there not lies, it’s merely political necessity.  Sullivan argues ‘what we must do is what Orwell demanded: speak plain English before it evaporates from our discourse, refuse to acquiesce to the corruption of language and decency.”

Pandia lists alternative search engines to the big 3 - Google, Yahoo and MSN. They include Ask.com, Snap, Factbites, Exalead, Gigablast and others.

Source: Pandia Search 

Stephen Thaler, working for the Air Force Research Laboratory is developing a software toolkit called CSMARRT (Creative, Self-Learning, Multi-Sensory, Adaptive, Reconfigurable, Robotics Toolbox) that can be used to design and model virtual robots that can be placed in virtual environments. The goal is to join the Creative Machine AI software he created 10 years ago with robotic hardware. Self-learning and adaptability are the keys to success. 

Source: Wired.com