Ng Beng Kiat is a talented guy who’s built many “micromouse” style robots. These tiny machines zip through mazes in disturbingly short amounts of time. His newest creation, Min5, is faster than the previous Min4A, which you can check out a really rad video of here. Watch the video all the way through - near the end Min4A does two optimized runs that are just insanely fast. What’s especially crazy is that somewhere, someone builds faster robots than this guy.

With the annual CES show kicking off, Wowwee is showing off their new products for 2008. The most interesting thing I noticed was the Rovio, which apparently includes NorthStar “GPS” - which I believe is actually NorthStar infrared localization, which was developed by Evolution Robotics. The development kit for this localization technology costs a cool $1700, while Wowwee’s robot will supposedly cost only $300. At that price, I would pick one up just to reverse engineer the NorthStar system.

So far as I know, the Rovio will be the first consumer robot to integrate NorthStar technology. Now if only Wowwee would build a cheap robot that uses VSLAM…