Everybody is talking about Hitachi's new robot, EMIEW. It's a two-wheeled balancer on the bottom and a vaguely humanoid robot on the top. EMIEW is 1.3 m tall, weighs 70 kg and can scoot along at 6 km/hr while avoiding objects with vision sensors and radar. The robot was created by the Hitachi Mechanical Engineering Research Lab which has produced a number of interesting robots over the past 40 years. And, in case you were wondering, EMIEW is an acronym for Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Workmate. For more on EMIEW see the Pittsburgh Post-gazette, BBC News, Taiwan News, and Slashdot.