Murata Girl had her coming out party at Ceatec.  She rides a unicycle, can be controlled by a bluetooth enabled wand and is the cutest robot I’ve seen in a while.

I’m happy she’s around.

You might have noticed, dear reader, that there’s been a lot of robot stories here.  Even more than normal.  There is a reason for this and it’s pretty simple.  There’s been a lot of good robot news lately.

For a while, things had been fairly quiet on the robot front.  A lot of stories were getting recycled.  Most of the “new” bots, I’d already dedicated a post to.  Things had slowed down since AIBO died and Qrio was murdered.  I started to lose heart.  There was nothing new, interesting or, God forbid, cute.

Anything new seemed to be a DARPA project.  I have mixed feelings about those people.  While I recognize that they do plenty of cutting-edge work that often benefits civilians, they do it to kill people.  Too much of the coverage dedicated to DARPA has a sickening “oh golly, that’s cool” attitude.  Sometimes the work does make you say “Oh Golly” or “That’s cool” but we shouldn’t forget why they do it.

To murder people. People like you and me.

I’m not sure why.  Has something to do with a flag.

Aside from all that, we should remember that DARPA also performs a propaganda function.  I didn’t want to cover all their projects because some of these things are just bullshit.  They only exist to show the technical superiority of the US military and, as such, they are often exaggerated.

Even if I wrote a post that said a project was evil, I would still be saying that it was possible.  Usually, I wouldn’t mind that.  Usually.  But, since there was such a dearth of good robot news, I did not want to give the impression that only DARPA was doing anything.  Even if it was the impression that I had.

So, basically, I took some time off from robots.

But, lately, there’s been a lot of electronics conventions, robot-type gatherings and a glut of robots that do things more useful than blowing up humans.  Even Murata Girl, who does nothing useful, avoids tearing human flesh from the bone, cracking open skulls and spilling brains all over the carpet.

Murata Girl is just cute.  That’s good enough.