• Tech Digest has a very interesting story about using a mesh of inter-dependent robots with a walking surface on top of them to simulate an endless floor in Virtual Reality a la Holodeck.
• A friend of mine turned me on to Jansen Mechanical Linkages, which could make some very interesting leg actuators for some walking/climbing robots without requiring the extra degrees of freedom which legged robots typically required.  Related to Jansen Linkages are Klann Mechanical Linkages (which are patented).
• It’s not exactly new, but while browsing the TED website, I came across a very interesting talk by Robert Full about using animal feet as inspiration for building robotic feet.
• Engadget has a fascinating story about a woman in New Zealand who has realized mankind’s dream of swimming like a fish with the help of a robotic mermaid tail prosthesis.  Not only does it allow this double amputee to swim, but looks really good while doing so.

Finally, just a bit on my own robotics work.  My latest purchase was a PICAXE 14M experimentation board that I’m planning on using as a motor controller for a simple two-wheel castor mobile robot platform.  It has 4 PWM analog outputs and supports I2C, so I should be able to issue commands to it from an Arduino mainboard.  Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that the PICAXE programming cable/circuit doesn’t work properly with the $10 IOGear USB/DB9 adapter I have, so I’m probably going to have to go track down a serial PCI card for my computer.