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Hopes that the tech industry was on the cusp of rolling personal robots into homes are dimming now that several once-promising consumer robotics companies have shut down.

When a robot "dies," does it make you sad? For lots of people, the answer is "yes"—and that tells us something important, and potentially worrisome, about our emotional responses to the social machines that are starting to move into our lives.

I loved the "Thundercats" cartoon as a child, watching cat-like humanoids fighting the forces of evil. Whenever their leader was in trouble, he'd unleash the Sword of Omens to gain "sight beyond sight," the ability to see events happening at faraway places, or bellow "Thunder, Thunder, Thunder, Thundercats, Hooo!" to instantaneously summon his allies to his location to join the fight. What kid didn't want those superpowers?

About a million Americans with injury or age-related disabilities need someone to help them eat. Now NIBIB funded engineers have taught a robot the strategies needed to pick up food with a fork and gingerly deliver it to a person's mouth.

FedEx Office is adding a new kind of worker in North Texas: A robot that can deliver a hot pepperoni pizza, a bag of groceries or a prescription to a customer's home. The bot could bring a swab for a strep test to a sick person's door and return hours later with medication, cough drops and a cup of chicken noodle soup.

Every year trash companies sift through an estimated 68 million tons of recycling, which is the weight equivalent of more than 30 million cars.

A 5K race can offer both victory and heartbreak, but capturing those moments on video requires both planning ahead and making on-the-spot decisions about where the camera operators should be.

Southwest Research Institute and ROS-Industrial developed a solution that enables industrial robots to scan and manipulate metallic objects that had previously been too "shiny" for machine vision to process.

Robots are getting smarter—and faster—at knowing what humans are feeling and thinking just by "looking" into their faces, a development that might one day allow more emotionally perceptive machines to detect changes in a person's health or mental state.

Humans will always make the final decision on whether armed robots can shoot, according to a statement by the US Department of Defense. Their clarification comes amid fears about a new advanced targeting system, known as ATLAS, that will use artificial intelligence in combat vehicles to target and execute threats. While the public may feel uneasy about so-called "killer robots", the concept is nothing new – machine-gun wielding "SWORDS" robots were deployed in Iraq as early as 2007.

From flocks of birds to fish schools in the sea, or towering termite mounds, many social groups in nature exist together to survive and thrive. This cooperative behaviour can be used by engineers as "bio-inspiration" to solve practical human problems, and by computer scientists studying swarm intelligence.

Next-generation wheelchairs could incorporate brain-controlled robotic arms and rentable add-on motors in order to help people with disabilities more easily carry out daily tasks or get around a city.

Japan's ambassador to the United Nations-backed Conference on Disarmament says his country has not developed fully autonomous weapons systems and has no plans to do so.

Robots will take over all jobs, so it is often thought. On the contrary, say Charissa Freese and Ton Wilthagen: robots will create jobs. It's just that these new jobs will be different, and the challenge is to anticipate which jobs will disappear, which ones will change, and what the new ones will be like – and when. Tilburg University aims to prepare employers and employees to the labor market of the near future.

Unlike conventional robot arms with hinged and swivel joints, new flexible arms being developed by Professor Stefan Seelecke and his research group at Saarland University are constructed using muscles made from shape-memory wires that have the ability to bend in almost any direction and to wind themselves around corners.