Artificial-intelligence technology that could change the way busy sports fans get their fix will be among the licensable intellectual property unveiled here Tuesday (March 23) by the newly formed Sharp Technology Ventures. The venture's charter is to commercialize technologies developed at Sharp Laboratories of America Inc. that have languished here in the labs "technologies that, for one reason or another, Sharp Corp. in Japan is not going to develop," said Jon Clemens, the leader of Sharp Technology Ventures. Clemens retired last year as director of Sharp Labs after getting permission from the $20 billion parent company in Osaka to form the tech venture company. "There will be many advantages to users as we license these technologies, but for me it's about the people who created them," Clemens said. "You don't join Sharp Labs to write papers; you want your technologies to get out there."

WHO would have thought that a Frisbee-shaped contraption that extracts dust from carpets would be the state of the art in household robots at the dawn of the 21st century? In the past year, Roomba, a circular automatic vacuum cleaner made by a firm called iRobot, has swept up millions of dollars from over 200,000 buyers--and was a must-have at Christmas, among geeks at least. Rival firms such as Electrolux and Karcher sell similar but pricier sweepers. Robot vacuum cleaners, it seems, are catching on. Are these mere playthings, or the beginning of a new trend?

IN 1981 Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old Japanese factory worker, climbed over a safety fence at a Kawasaki plant to carry out some maintenance work on a robot. In his haste, he failed to switch the robot off properly. Unable to sense him, the robot's powerful hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a grinding machine. His death made Urada the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot. This gruesome industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behaviour was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov, a science-fiction writer.

In Silicon Valley, Nikolas Janin rises for his 40-minute commute to work just like everyone else. The shop manager and fleet technician at Google gets dressed and heads out to his Lexus RX 450h for the trip on California's clotted freeways. That's when his chauffeur – the car – takes over. One of Google's self-driving vehicles, Mr. Janin's ride is equipped with sophisticated artificial intelligence technology that allows him to sit as a passenger in the driver's seat. Its first real job, expected later this year, will be as a telemedicine robot, allowing a specialist thousands of miles away to visit patients' hospital rooms via a video screen mounted as its "head." When the physician is ready to visit another patient, he taps the new location on a computer map: Ava finds its own way to the next room, including using the elevator. In Pullman, Wash., researchers at Washington State University are fitting "smart" homes with sensors that automatically adjust the lighting needed in rooms and monitor and interpret all the movements and actions of its occupants, down to how many hours they sleep and minutes they exercise.

Toshiba Corp. unveiled a robot Wednesday that it says can withstand high radiation and help in nuclear disasters. What exactly the new machine will be capable of doing, however, when it gets the go-ahead to enter Japan's crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, remains unclear. The four-legged robot can climb over debris and venture into radiated areas off-limits to human workers. One significant innovation, Toshiba said, is that its wireless network can be controlled in high radiation, automatically seeking better transmission when reception becomes weak. But the machine, which looks like an ice cooler on wobbly metal legs, also appears prone to glitches.

This paper describes a Hong Kong MTR Corporation subway project to enhance and extend the current Web-based Engineering Works and Traffic Information Management System (ETMS) with an intelligent "AI Engine." The challenge is to be able to fully and accurately encapsulate all the necessary domain and operation knowledge on subway engineering works and to be able to apply this knowledge in an efficient manner for both validation as well as scheduling. Since engineering works can only be performed a few hours each night, it is crucially important that the "AI Engine" maximizes the number of jobs done while ensuring operational safety and resource availability. Previously, all constraint/resource checking and scheduling decisions were made manually. The new AI approach streamlines the entire planning, scheduling and rescheduling process and extends the ETMS with intelligent abilities to (1) automatically detect potential conflicts as work requests are entered, (2) check all approved work schedules for any conflicts before execution, (3) generate weekly operational schedules, (4) repair schedules after changes and (5) generate quarterly schedules for planning.

Since the 1960s, politicians and pundits have predicted the imminent arrival of a digital utopia in which robots would do the washing up and we would live in peace and harmony in an electronically connected, global village, thanks to the net. So why are the utopian visions of 40 years ago strangely similar to the ones we hold today? Because business and political leaders have consistently pushed a carefully orchestrated fantasy of the future to distract us from the present, says Richard Barbrook, who explores the subject in Imaginary Futures - From Thinking Machines to the Global Village. Barbrook, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Westminster, has been researching this topic for more than four years. What he wants is to show how ideology is used to warp time.

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Compressed air flows beneath silicone skin, triggering actuators that raise her arms and lift the corners of her mouth into a demure smile. She seems to compose herself, her eyes panning the room where she stands fixed to a platform, tubes and wires running down through her ankles. She blinks, then turns her face toward me. I can't help but meet her--its--mechanical gaze. "Are you surprised that I'm a robot?" she asks.

Once the fantasy of science fiction, battlefield robots are now a reality. "The whole idea is to take the war fighter out of harm's way," Robin Laird said. Laird is supervisor of the Unmanned Systems Branch of the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego. "In my mind, someday we'll be doing battle with robots not killing people," said Laird, whose program serves all four branches of the U.S. military. The military robots currently available, however, are not nearly as sophisticated as those that are sometimes portrayed by Hollywood films.