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Aibo, a $2,899 robotic dog from Sony, just might scamper its way onto some wish lists this holiday season.

The world's most advanced sweet pepper harvesting robot, developed in a consortium including Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers, was introduced last week at the Research Station for Vegetable Production at St. Katelijne Waver in Belgium.

Grapes must be picked at the exact point of maturation, and its plant must have the appropriate intake of water during development so that the wine ends up with desired properties. Controlling those parameters is complicated and expensive, and few can afford to use pressure chambers that measure water potential.

In the movie Terminator 2, the T-1000 robot pours itself through the ceiling of an elevator. That scene started a flow of ideas for Purdue Polytechnic Institute professor Richard Voyles.

With the rising shortage of skilled workforce in agriculture, there's a growing need for robotisation to perform labour-intensive and repetitive tasks in greenhouses. Enter SWEEPER, the EU-funded project developing a sweet pepper-harvesting robot that can help farmers reduce their costs.

Robots will handle 52 percent of current work tasks by 2025, almost twice as many as now, a World Economic Forum (WEF) study said Monday.

There's a lot of hype around the release of Sony's latest robotic dog. It's called Aibo, and is promoted as using artificial intelligence to respond to people looking at it, talking to it and touching it.

For several years, civil society groups have been calling for a ban on what they call "killer robots". Scores of technologists have lent their voice to the cause. Some two dozen governments now support a ban and several others would like to see some kind of international regulation.

A dividing line is emerging in the debate over so-called killer robots. Many countries want to see new international law on autonomous weapon systems that can target and kill people without human intervention. But those countries already developing such weapons are instead trying to highlight their supposed benefits.

Semi-autonomous and autonomous machines and robots can become moral machines using annotated decision trees containing ethical assumptions or justifications for interactions with animals.

A key opponent of high-tech, automated weapons known as "killer robots" is blaming countries like the U.S. and Russia for blocking consensus at a U.N.-backed conference, where most countries wanted to ensure that humans stay at the controls of lethal machines.

The reception at the Henn na Hotel east of Tokyo is eerily quiet until customers approach the robot dinosaurs manning the front desk. Their sensors detect the motion and they bellow "Welcome."

Welcome to the 21st century, where a request for extra towels in your hotel room may be answered by a roughly 4-foot-high purple robot on wheels.

The Chinese kindergarten children giggled as they worked to solve puzzles assigned by their new teaching assistant: a roundish, short educator with a screen for a face.

Scientists at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory have developed software to ensure that if a robot falls, it can get itself back up, meaning future military robots will be less reliant on their Soldier handlers.