Giant Freakin Robot

Before they were a bloated Michael Bay franchise starring Shia LeBouef and the hottie of the week, Transformers were an awesome set of kid’s toys based on the simple premise of being able to shift back and forth between an everyday object like a car and a bad ass robot. A whole generation of nerds have grown up desperately wishing that their ride could become Optimus Prime on demand. We’re still a long way from that, but this fan-made “Transformer” is at least a couple steps above your standard toy robot in disguise:

Apparently the 1980s were much closer to a Jetson’s style future than most of us really thought. Sure we were all in love with the droids from Star Wars, terrified of Terminators, and in the Balboa’s did have a robot butler in Rocky IV. As it turns out, they weren’t the only ones. In 1983 in Pasadena, California, Chinese fast-food restaurant Two Panda Deli put a pair of robots to work as waiters.

Named Tanbo R-1 and Tanbo R-2, and the Japanese-built automaton duo was responsible for lugging trays of fried rice, spicy pork, and chow mein to waiting diners. The two bots looked suspiciously like R2D2, stood four-and-a-half-feet tall, and tipped the scales at 180 pounds. The Tanbos were programmed to serve customers in three languages, and were quite the sensation as they delivered food and cracked jokes.

If you aren’t prepared to be ruled by a race of government-produced super-robots, I have some news for you. It’s going to happen, and likely sooner rather than later. Sure, we’ve passed all the points in the Terminator timelines when Skynet was scheduled to go live, but that doesn’t mean humans aren’t still slowly setting themselves up for a hostile uprising a la Battlestar Galactica.

Case in point, DARPA has released footage of their latest bipedal robot climbing stairs, a task it needs to accomplish in order to reach most human bedrooms so they can murder their oppressors in their sleep. Witness your future overlords below.

We’re a long way away from robots being able to actual write their own music, but apparently artificial technology has progressed to the point that it’s at least as capable as your average wedding band. Or near enough. Drexel Engineering has robots ready and willing to perform.

Watch robots rock out, sort of, as they perform “Come Together” right now…