Paralyzed for the past 20 years, former Israeli paratrooper Radi Kaiof now walks down the street issuing a faint mechanical hum. That is the sound of an electronic exoskeleton that moves the 41-year-old's legs and propels him forward. "I never dreamed I would walk again. After I was wounded, I forgot what it's like," said Kaiof, who was injured while serving in the Israeli military in 1988. "Only when standing up can I feel how tall I really am and speak to people eye to eye, not from below."

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column on Wednesday November 1 2006 In the report below we describe John Pike as "director of global security and spokesman for the Federation of American Scientists". He has not held that position for some years. He is the founder and director of GlobalSecurity.org In November 2004, during the second battle of Fallujah, an American uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) - a robot plane - located a mortar battery that had been hampering the US operation to retake the town.The mortar's position was logged by the UAV's operator, who was sitting at his desk in Nellis Air Force base near Las Vegas, thousands of miles away. Using the internet, the operator contacted the operator of another armed UAV at a desk in central command ("Centcom") - a safe area away from the theatre of war, with centres in Kuwait, Qutar or Iraq.

When Garry Kasparov was beaten, to his furious humiliation, by IBM's Deep Blue chess computer in 1997, it left human players pondering their future. Draughts, Othello, backgammon, Scrabble: by the start of this century, each had been all but conquered by machines. Almost a decade later, with Moore's Law still at work, there is still a board game in which humans reign supreme. The game is Go, an oriental game of strategy. The board is a 19 by 19 grid of intersecting lines.

"How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover'? This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to 2001." Perhaps it was the psychedelic movement of the late 1960's that saved Stanley Kubrick's tale of first contact with an extra-terrestrial intelligence from being buried in oblivion. The initial response to the film was extremely polarised if not hostile, and at the box office it wasn't a hit either. Rumour has it MGM, ready to pull the movie after a few weeks, was told by theater owners there's more people coming to the shows at last but those people were somewhat different -- a young crowd, smoking pot before the screenings.

This is part of IEEE Spectrum's special R&D report: They Might Be Giants: Seeds of a Tech Turnaround. Our own little software robots, they were supposed to represent us on the World Wide Web, which was already shaping up to be more information than any unaided human could sift through. Agents were going to know all about our needs, likes, and interests. They would forage every night for news and information, book our business travel for us, even do the preliminary research for our next management report. These robots were hard to build--too hard, actually. After all, Web pages are designed for human consumption. Words have meaning, indeed, multiple meanings: Is a particular document on "banking" about saving money or turning an airplane?

Self-driving cars that allow drivers to take their hands and minds completely off the road won't come cheap if they go on sale in the next decade or two. But a Dutch and Israeli company called Mobileye envisions its relatively inexpensive driver assistance technology becoming widespread by 2016. Mobileye has raised $400 million to back its development of semi-autonomous driving technology in partnership with automakers such as General Motors, BMW, and Volvo. The company, valued at $1.5 billion, aims to deploy technology that can take over for drivers during stop-and-go traffic or handle long stretches of highway driving--features that won't cost nearly as much as Google's famous self-driving cars, according to the New York Times: "In some ways, the goal is not dissimilar to the already famous Google driverless cars, though the search giant's systems allow for completely hands-off driving. But Mobileye is aiming to get most of the functionality into cars for much less, with fewer cameras and computer equipment that cost hundreds of dollars, rather than the tens of thousand of dollars that Google's array of sensors is estimated to cost at the moment."

Microsoft's Kinect, the motion-sensing system that lets users play Xbox games without a controller, has been repurposed for many a hack, from steering RC cars to Whole Foods shopping carts. Now, researchers at North Carolina State University say they're employing the video game technology to gather information about how best to control a swarm of circuit-equipped cockroaches. Once the system is refined, a troop of these roach biobots could be sent into the wreckage of a collapsed building or an earthquake, in order to save your life. Late last year, the NC State engineers demonstrated how they could direct a remote-controlled roach through an S-shaped course with a 10 percent success rate. In this iteration of the experiment, the electronic backpacks lugged by the roaches--which take over their movements in a kind of creepy robo-possession--remain the same.

Language barriers are starting to crumble. This month Japan's dominant mobile phone operator, NTT DoCoMo, introduced the world's first app for real-time voice translation. When a user with a DoCoMo smartphone places a call through the app, he speaks in Japanese and his words are promptly translated into English, Mandarin, or Korean. To complete the conversational circuit, the other person's words are translated from any of those languages back into Japanese. With this debut we've taken one step closer to building a mechanical Babel fish, the extraordinarily useful creature imagined by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Most of the world's robots are about as charismatic as a coffeemaker. Nexi is baby-faced and blue-eyed, and Leonardo has been described variously as a squirrel, a furry alien, and a giant Furby. After years of making emotionally engaging machines with her students at the MIT Media Lab's Personal Robots Group, Breazeal thinks the time has finally come for a personal robot to inhabit our homes and help us live our lives. To pursue that goal, she founded Jibo, a Boston startup that has raised US $38.6 million to produce a friendly robo-assistant to families. Equipped with cameras and microphones, the robot, also called Jibo, is a little taller than a toaster and shaped like a desk fan.

Aerial robotics research has brought us flapping hummingbirds, seagulls, bumblebees, and dragonflies. But if these robots are to do anything more than bear a passing resemblance to their animal models, there is one thing they'll definitely need: better vision. In February, at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, two teams presented new work (PDF) aimed at building better-performing and lower-power vision systems that would help aerial robots navigate and aid them in identifying objects. Dongsuk Jeon, a graduate student working with Zhengya Zhang and IEEE Fellows David Blaauw and Dennis Sylvester at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, outlined an approach to drastically lower the power of the very first stage of any vision system--the feature extractor. That system uses an algorithm to draw out potentially important features like circles and squares from an overall image.