Japanese engineers have created yet another robot baby, because, you know, you can't have enough of a good thing. Affetto is a tabletop baby head that's cute enough to be in the next Chucky film. Scientists seem to have an insatiable desire to study baby development not by studying real babies, but by building robot babies. Designed to look like a 1- or 2-year-old child (minus the body), Affetto has realistic facial expressions and is meant to be treated as a human being by caregivers. It has lifelike eyes and can open its mouth.

Here's some Craveworthy news: a toy version of the very cute, very cool dancing robot Keepon is in the works, and it will sell for only $40. BeatBots, the firm behind the Keepon project, has teamed with Britain's Wow Stuff to develop the dance machine into a toy called My Keepon. A prototype is being shown off this week at the Nuremberg Toy Fair. So far, the high-end, $30,000 version of Keepon, developed by Marek Michalowski and Hideki Kozima, has been used in Japan and the U.S. as a telepresence tool for autism research and therapy. Keepon can look around with its camera eyes, bounce up and down like an excited baby, and dance to a groove.

If you ever feel like robots are getting the upper hand on humanity, consider using your own hands to put them in their place. Researcher Akihiro Nakamura from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in Japan has developed a motion controller for iRobot's Roomba vacuum bots that recognizes his gestures and posture. The system is yet another Microsoft Kinect hack using the OpenNI API. The gestural interface eliminates the need to bend over and push Roomba's buttons. It also allows you to lord it over the overgrown hockey puck.

With child-like eyes staring out from an expressionless face, the Telenoid R1 does look a little creepy. But if Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Japan's Osaka University has his way, a miniature Telenoid that lets you "feel" the presence of the party on the other line could soon replace the cell phones of today. It turns out the future could be just around the corner as the roboticist said a prototype of the mobile "Elfoid" would be ready in a few months. Speaking today at the sneak preview of the Singapore-based Asia on the Edge festival--an annual showcase of ideas and cultures from Asia--Ishiguro is most regarded for his development of lifelike androids. He has even created a mechanical doppelganger of himself called Geminoid in his bid to understand humans.

LAS VEGAS--From robo-dinosaurs to mecha-masseurs, robots at CES 2011 ran the gamut of wacky novelty products like the Sphero iPhone-controlled ball and the WheeMe back massage robot to practical but funked-out floor cleaners like dancing Mint sweepers. There wasn't a whole lot that was new, but there were enough debuts and upgrades to keep it interesting. Japan's Murata Manufacturing, which makes capacitors found in many mobile phones, showed off its robotics skills with Murata Boy (above) and Murata Girl, which cycle along balance beams without toppling over. Making their CES debut, the acrobat bots can stand upright even when stationary thanks to gyro sensors that control a rotating disk, which in turn corrects their slant. Massachusetts-based iRobot, meanwhile, took the wraps off a more compact Scooba floor scrubber that can clean around toilets, as well as an improved line of Roomba vacuum robots.

If you thought your English teacher was a robotic bore, spare a thought for kids in South Korea. They're being taught by real robots. The city of Daegu introduced 29 robot teachers in 19 elementary schools as part of a large-scale project to robotize teaching. The ambitious effort envisioned robots in all 8,400 kindergartens in Korea by 2013. Kids at Hakjung Elementary School seemed thrilled to interact with robots like the globular Engkey (above and in the vid below).

Bipedal robots taking pogo-like leaps may be the future of moon exploration, according to an idea the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency intends to test in practice. The moon's gravity is roughly one-sixth that on Earth, which has made it hard for astronauts to maintain their balance as they tried to keep their feet on the planet's surface while walking around. The phenomenon is perhaps best associated in the popular mind with footage taken in 1969 of astronaut Neil Armstrong taking gravity-defying leaps on the moon. But JAXA, which is among the Japanese agencies that wants to send humanoid robot explorers to the moon in lieu of humans, believes the "pogo jumping" style would be the best way for the machines to carry out future explorations. Atsuo Takanishi of Tokyo's Waseda University is developing a software simulation of the Wabian-2R to test how a bipedal robot would fare under moon-like conditions.

We've seen running bipedal robots before, but they tend to move like, well, robots. Ryuma Niiyama of MIT's Robot Locomotion Group wants to build a bot that runs as much like a human as possible, right down to the black nylon running shorts. The robot, aptly named Athlete, sports an artificial musculoskeletal system that mirrors human muscles in the leg, hip, lower abdomen, and booty and has a springy elastic blade foot like those seen on prosthetic running legs. Niiyama's goal is a flexible, agile robot with less of a mechanical gait and more of a Usain Bolt-type stride. Athlete has seven sets of actuator-driven artificial muscles in each leg, plus touch sensors on each foot and an inertial measurement unit on the torso for detecting the body's orientation.

Imagine having your morning cuppa joe served by a charming little humanoid robot--just like in the neat ad above and below. "What can I get for you?" Brewbot asks in the TV commercial after performing an impressive transformation from ordinary kitchen appliance to bipedal robo-barista. Kraft Foods' Tassimo Brewbot is a coffeemaker that can whip up seven beverages including coffee, espresso, and latte. It uses single-serve "T-discs" from makers like Maxwell House and Twinings; the discs have brewing instructions embedded in barcodes. That's all very well and nice, and I'm sure Brewbot's coffee is just fine.

No massage could ever come close to those given by Eleanor, the miracle worker who is CNET's in-house masseuse (we do have to pay for her time, but rates are good). Sometimes, however, even she needs a day off, and for those sad occasions, we're thinking CNET might want to invest in a few WheeMe massage robots. Yes, they wash our hair and give us sponge baths, and now robots are climbing atop our backs to massage our aching muscles, too. Employing tilt sensor technology, the palm-size bot from Israel's DreamBots automatically steers itself around at 4.5 centimeters per second, gently caressing your muscles with "patented fingerettes" that make it look like the love child of a toy car and a rubber caterpillar. DreamBots points out that WheeMe works best on horizontal surfaces such as the back or stomach (although one or two photos on the DreamBots site hint at more provocative targets).