By Evan Ackerman

We’re assuming that many of you are taking Friday off to prepare for celebrating the 4th of July. We are too, hence Video Thursday this week. If you don’t live in the United States, you should take Friday off anyway, because a celebration that involves grilling and fireworks is pretty great, whether or not you happen to observe the fact that a handful of annoyed colonies started a bit of a tiff with Britain a while back. And if you’re fromBritain, well, you should just be glad that you managed to get rid of us when you did.

Anyway, let’s watch some robot videos and then get out of here and enjoy the long weekend, shall we?

For better or worse, the biggest thing that happened in robotics this week was some guys from MegaBots challenging some other guys from Suidobashi Heavy Industry to a giant robot duel. We’re not making any claims that this is advancing the field in any way, or really that these are robots as opposed to just fancy remote-controlled vehicle things, but even so, this is alarmingly awesome: ..[Read more]