Fremont resident Rakesh Guliani likes to say that a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner saved his marriage. Messy floors had been causing friction, says the 41-year-old Guliani (pronounced Goo-liani). His wife, Kavita, 35, was particularly annoyed by the footprints he and their daughters, Ashna, 10, and Rhea, 6, tended to track through the house. "I am soccer coach to both of them, and when we come in with our dirty cleats, I am more tolerant of that because I am tracking dirt, too," says Guliani, vice president of the job-placement firm Park Computer Systems. He vacuumed several times a week but it never seemed enough to satisfy his wife, a technical writer for Google.

Most of us only dream about a robot that will pick up pizza boxes and assemble furniture, but Andrew Ng, an assistant computer science professor at Stanford, is building one. Leader of the STair -- or Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot -- project, Ng, 30, believes every home eventually will have one. There are four concrete challenges: to have the robot able to clean up after a dinner party, clear the table, load the dishwasher; be able to fetch items from around the office or home; to assemble an Ikea bookshelf; and to give a tour of this research lab. Within a decade we would like to develop the technology. A year ago I said 15 years.

Buoyed by the success of two robotic rovers exploring the surface of Mars, NASA scientists are building smarter and more- agile robots that can rappel down cliffs, slither between cracks and even have the sense to detect trouble. Scientist Silvano Colombano stood next to one of the new machines on a recent morning at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, where he demonstrated an eight-legged robot called Scorpion. It can climb up steep hills and plunge into rough terrain where its wheeled counterparts can't go. Next to Colombano, computer engineer Maria Bualat showed off the K9 rover, a robot similar to the Mars rovers, but one that can perform tasks 10 times faster than its cousins, which have been exploring the Red Planet since early last year. The new robots might get their chance in a few years.

While drug companies struggle to develop medicines for rich countries and typically overlook diseases elsewhere, a robot scientist named Eve has found compounds that could fight drug-resistant malaria. Eve's developers believe their artificial intelligence (AI) technology could speed up drug discovery, as critics call for a "match" with a live chemist. The AI-endowed robot is designed to add a new, advanced ability to learn on top of the computational smarts that the pharmaceutical industry already uses. In research published February 4 in Journal of the Royal Society Interface computer scientist Ross King from the University of Manchester in England and his team say Eve found a chemical called TNP-470 effectively targets an enzyme that is key to the growth of Plasmodium vivax, one of the parasites that causes malaria. "I didn't expect to actually find any useful compounds, I thought we'd just demonstrate the AI," King says.

Between bouts of eating this Thanksgiving weekend you might want to head outside and toss a football, shoot some hoops or kick a soccer ball around to get a little exercise. If the weather's nasty (or if you live in Buffalo) perhaps Ping Pong or a game of pool will do. Can't get any people in your house off the couch? Of course "a robot that plays soccer" could mean anything from a little cube 15 centimeters high that pushes a tiny ball on a tabletop field, to supersize automatons. For holiday fun I've collected videos of humanoids as well as nonhuman-like contraptions that play a real game on a real surface--with a little latitude for "real."

There is a strong possibility that in the not-too-distant future, artificial intelligences (AIs), perhaps in the form of robots, will become capable of sentient thought. Whatever form it takes, this dawning of machine consciousness is likely to have a substantial impact on human society. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and physicist Stephen Hawking have in recent months warned of the dangers of intelligent robots becoming too powerful for humans to control. The ethical conundrum of intelligent machines and how they relate to humans has long been a theme of science fiction, and has been vividly portrayed in films such as 1982's Blade Runner and this year's Ex Machina. Academic and fictional analyses of AIs tend to focus on human–robot interactions, asking questions such as: would robots make our lives easier?

Police may soon have a new way to catch pedophiles who distribute child abuse photos anonymously online. The technology could also help law enforcement agencies in other ways, such as identifying smartphone thieves who take pictures with the stolen gadgets and then post their snapshots on the Internet. Riccardo Satta, scientific project officer of the European Commission Joint Research Center's Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen, described the work he did with fellow researcher Pasquale Stirparo at the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection Conference in Brussels held in January.* The key is the ability to spot a unique, unremovable pattern--or signature--that each digital camera imprints on photographs. By comparing the signature from a specific camera with those found in images posted to social media, a forensic investigator would be able to establish that all the images had been taken by the same camera.

A self-driving car carrying a family of four on a rural two-lane highway spots a bouncing ball ahead. As the vehicle approaches a child runs out to retrieve the ball. Should the car risk its passengers' lives by swerving to the side--where the edge of the road meets a steep cliff? Or should the car continue on its path, ensuring its passengers' safety at the child's expense? This scenario and many others pose moral and ethical dilemmas that carmakers, car buyers and regulators must address before vehicles should be given full autonomy, according to a study published Thursday in Science.

Mobile devices have become incredibly popular for their ability to weave modern conveniences such as Internet access and social networking into the fabric of daily life. For people with disabilities, however, these devices have the potential to unlock unprecedented new possibilities for communication, navigation and independence. This emergence of mobile "assistive" technologies, influenced heavily by the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) 25 years ago, marks a major step forward for people with disabilities. The U.S. Congress passed the ADA in July 1990 as a civil rights law to protect people with disabilities from discrimination. The act requires that businesses, schools and government agencies must follow certain requirements to ensure people have equal access to their services and facilities.

The word "drone", a short term for an unmanned aerial vehicle, usually conjures up images of a menacing machine that spies and shoots from on high. However, over the past three years, a new generation of drones has emerged to address civilian and humanitarian needs, from surveying disaster zones to delivering aid. In the future, friendly drones could even whisk commuters above congested streets or haul cargo across Africa – if a desperate lack of legislation is addressed. Rapid progress in two key technological areas lies behind this new wave of friendly drones. On the one hand, essential parts including batteries and sensors have become smaller and cheaper, largely because of progress in commercial electronic devices.