What if mankind evacuated Earth and forgot to turn off the last remaining robot?

This is the premise of Pixar Studio's latest film, Wall-E, to be relased this coming summer. 

Even though Lem beat me to it, I've been meaning to post about Wall-E ever since my wife and I saw the trailer in front of another Pixar film, Ratatouille. The film is directed by Andrew Stanton, the writer and director of Pixar's earlier smash hit, Finding Nemo, and features, as its main character, a robot named Wall-E.

Wall-E is a robot designed to clean up the trash caused by humans, but when the humans leave earth to find a better planet, Wall-E is left behind - for 700 years. When the humans (and robots) finally return, Wall-E falls in love with a robot named Eve, who is sent on a probe to check on the status of Earth. Not surprisingly, Eve doesn't return his feelings.

In designing the robots, director Stanton told his designers to model them after appliances. Also interesting is that this movie will not feature voice actors, but instead have sound effects that sound like voices. This should be interesting to see if it can still capture the audience's imagination. The sound design will be done by Ben Burtt, who created many of the sounds for droids in the Star Wars movie.

Of all the recent films about robots, this one might have me the most excited. Pixar does good work and I'm anxious to see what comes of it. Besides, you just can't beat Wall-E in the cuteness department, and because of this, there's even a Wall-E builder's group for the serious fans. If you build one, how about sending us your pictures?

Check out the trailer after the jump.

The world for terrorists and evil-doers just keeps getting scaier and scaier. First it was Predator drones with helfire missiles , then it was PackBots that can fire at 1,000,000 rounds/minute (more on this later), and now it's tiny flying vehicles with on-board cameras. Oh, did I mention they're tiny? The WIRED: Danger Room reports that a group from the Netherlands, the Delft University of Technology, has created these tiny insectocopters with a 25cm wingspan, and are currently working on making them even smaller.

Currently, the DelFly II, fits in a 30cm sphere and can fly at a rate of 15m/seconds, in addition to being able to hover, and fly in reverse.

Some things that we'd love to see in the future include tags for the episodes so users can quickly find videos on topics that interest them (like robotics), and the ability to embedd the videos into other websites and blogs - like this one. One nice feature that EngineeringTV makes available is an easy download link for all their videos.

 And just when you thought it couldn't get worse, according to this Boston Globe article, "iRobot's suit alleges that one day after his resignation [from iRobot in June 2002], Ahed used his still-active iRobot e-mail account to send confidential iRobot files to a Robotic FX address."

Also,

Instead, the winner was Robotic FX of Alsip, IL - a company that iRobot is currently suing for patent infringement and theft of proprietary designs (more on this in later posts).

And while, "iRobot ...  has delivered more than 1,000 IED and cave-clearing, remote-controlled PackBots to the Army and Marine Corps since 2002", it's not entirely clear why the Army chose Robotic FX's systems over iRobot's. The best guess seems to revolve around price. According to Thorn at Robot Stock News, "The contract appears to be about $93,000 per robot, while iRobot's PackBots have generally been in the $120K-$150K range."

Jameel Ahed, the president of Robotic FX, said, "This procurement was competed on a two-step technically acceptable, low price basis and we are very excited to have won. We look forward to producing our high-quality, easy-to-operate robots for our soldiers.”

Joe Dyer, head of iRobots government division is quoted as saying,