Don't let the name fool you. Bossa Nova Robotics is actually a toymaker. Sarjoun Skaff, who founded the company with two other colleagues, was working on his Ph.D. in robotics at Carnegie Mellon ...

Ever have one of those weekend projects that takes on a life of its own? [Michael] did, and the result is this PenguinBot. While [Michael’s] wife was away for the weekend he happened upon a broken toy ...

Skaff had always been interested in making toy robots. “It’s the best way to introduce robotics to the public,” he says. “And toys allow you unlimited creativity.” RHex, however, wasn’t a toy. It was ...

There’s a catch to studying penguins in the wild: If researchers get too close, penguins get so stressed out that they may be less likely to successfully breed or hatch an egg. So an enterprising ...

As I rounded corner after corner at the NY Toy Fair this week, there they were: robots, and lots of them. Some were fuzzy and wanted to be my friend. Some had a menacing mechanical appeal. Others ...

If you're going to build a robotic spy, you might as well make it a cutie -- especially if it needs to go incognito in crowds of adorable penguin chicks and their parents. Researchers report in Nature ...