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English-speaking AI robots will be helping out in some 500 Japanese classrooms from next year as the country seeks to improve its English skills among both children and teachers.

Robots that can diagnose diseases, play badminton and wow audiences with their musical skills are among the machines China hopes could revolutionise its economy, with visitors to a Beijing exhibition offered a glimpse of an automated future.

In future decades, the need for effective strategies for medical rehabilitation will increase significantly, because patients' rate of survival after diseases with severe functional deficits, such as a stroke, will increase. Socially assistive robots (SARs) are already being used in rehabilitation for this reason. In the journal Science Robotics, a research team led by neuroscientist Dr. Philipp Kellmeyer of the Freiburg University Medical Center and Prof. Dr. Oliver Müller from the Department of Philosophy of the University of Freiburg, analyzes the improvements necessary to make SARs valuable and trustworthy assistants for medical therapies.

Researchers at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University developed a new technique to quickly teach robots novel traversal behaviors with minimal human oversight.

New England is known for being an excellent source of lobster and other seafood. But while fishing is done locally, much of the processing is outsourced to other countries. A lack of local manpower means scallops caught off the coast of Massachusetts might travel to China or India for processing before they appear on your plate at a restaurant in Boston.

Will automation, AI and robotics mean a jobless future, or will their productivity free us to innovate and explore? Is the impact of new technologies to be feared, or a chance to rethink the structure of our working lives and ensure a fairer future for all?

Movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner and The Terminator brought rogue robots and computer systems to our cinema screens. But these days, such classic science fiction spectacles don't seem so far removed from reality.

Today's crop breeders are trying to boost yields while also preparing crops to withstand severe weather and changing climates. To succeed, they must locate genes for high-yielding, hardy traits in crop plants' DNA. A robot developed by the University of Illinois to find these proverbial needles in the haystack was recognized by the best systems paper award at Robotics: Science and Systems, the preeminent robotics conference held last week in Pittsburgh.

It has played football with former US president Barack Obama and danced for German leader Angela Merkel, but Honda's ASIMO robot may have reached the end of the line.

The conversation around artificial intelligence and automation seems dominated by either doomsayers who fear robots will supplant all humans in the workforce, or optimists who think there's nothing new under the sun. But MIT Sloan professor Erik Brynjolfsson and his colleagues say that debate needs to take a different tone.

Robots can help do a lot of things—assemble cars, search for explosives, cook a meal or aid in surgery. But one thing they can't do is tell you how they're doing—yet.

Robots will be a necessity with the ageing population needing assistance to improve their mobility. On the long road to help seniors maintain their life quality, EU researchers have developed a unique prototype robot.

SmokeBot is a robot developed to assist fire services and rescue units in deployments under critical conditions. It collects data about accident and disasters situations with extremely limited visibility, effectively improving the safety of rescue operations.

"The price of solar-generated electricity continues to plummet, and the technology is taking over as the least expensive form of energy in more and more parts of the world," says solar cell researcher John Atle Bones at SINTEF.

It speaks two languages, gives math lessons, tells jokes and interacts with children through the tablet screen in its chest—China's latest robot is the babysitter every parent needs.