Since the 1960s, robots have assumed major roles in industrial manufacturing and assembly, the remote detonation of explosives, search and rescue, and academic research. But the devices have remained out of reach, in affordability and practicality, to most consumers. That, according to Professor Andrew Ng, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University in California, is about to change. One big reason, Mr. Ng said, is the mass production of smartphones and game consoles, which has driven down the size and price of robotic building blocks like accelerometers, gyroscopes and sensors. On the edges of consumer consciousness, the first generation of devices with rudimentary artificial intelligence are beginning to appear: entertainment and educational robots like the Hexy, and a line of tireless household drones that can mow lawns, sweep floors, clean swimming pools and even enhance golf games.

People are good at understanding one another's emotions. We realize quickly that now is not a good time to approach the boss or that a loved one is having a lousy day. These skills are so essential that those without them are considered disabled. Yet until recently, our machines could not identify even seemingly simple emotions, like anger or frustration. The GPS device chirps happily even when the driver is ready to hurl it out the window.

In late January, iRobot expanded a partnership with InTouch Health, a small company that enables doctors at computer screens to treat stroke victims and other patients from afar. And this week, Texas Instruments said it would supply iRobot with powerful new processors that could help the robots be more interactive and gradually lower their cost. "We have a firm belief that the robotics market is on the cusp of exploding," said Remi El-Ouazzane, vice president and general manager of the Texas Instruments unit that makes the processors. Mr. Angle's hopes for broadening the industry's appeal are shared by other robot companies, which have struggled to expand beyond industrial and military uses, toys and other niche products. Programming robots to mimic human behavior remains difficult.

Can you put it in a machine? And if you did, how could you ever know for sure? Unlike any other scientific topics, consciousness -- the first-person awareness of the world around -- is truly in the eye of the beholder. I know I am conscious. But how do I know that you are? Could it be that my colleagues, my friends, my editors, my wife, my child, all the people I see on the streets of New York are actually just mindless automatons who merely act as if they were conscious human beings? Through logical analogy -- I am a conscious human being, and therefore you as a human being are also likely to be conscious -- I conclude I am probably not the only conscious being in a world of biological puppets.

Dr. Saul Amarel, who helped develop the field of artificial intelligence and founded the computer science department at Rutgers University, died on Wednesday in Princeton, N.J., where he lived. The cause was complications of cancer, according to Rutgers. At Rutgers, Dr. Amarel developed computer time-sharing, and his laboratory became an early node on Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet. He took a leave in the 1980's to spend a few years directing a computer science program at the Pentagon, and returned to Rutgers in 1988. Among his peers, Dr. Amarel was perhaps best known for a paper he wrote in 1968, which put him at the vanguard of the artificial intelligence movement.

Using only her thoughts, a Massachusetts woman paralyzed for 15 years directed a robotic arm to pick up a bottle of coffee and bring it to her lips, researchers report in the latest advance in harnessing brain waves to help disabled people. In the past year, similar stories have included a quadriplegic man in Pennsylvania who made a robotic arm give a high-five and stroke his girlfriend's hand, and a partially paralyzed man who remotely controlled a small robot that scooted around in a Swiss lab. But will the experimental brain-controlled technology ever help paralyzed people in everyday life? Experts in the technology and in rehabilitation medicine say they are optimistic that it will, once technology improves and the cost comes down. The latest report, which was published online Wednesday in the journal Nature, comes from scientists at Brown University, the Providence VA Medical Center in Rhode Island, Harvard Medical School and elsewhere.

Jean-Pierre Changeux is France's most famous neuroscientist. Though less well known in the United States, he has directed a famous laboratory at the Pasteur Institute for more than thirty years, taught as a professor at the Collège de France, and written a number of works exploring "the neurobiology of meaning." Aside from his own books, Changeux has published two wide-ranging dialogues about mind and matter, one with the mathematician Alain Connes and the other with the late French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Changeux came of age at a fortunate time. Born in 1936, he began his studies when the advent both of the DNA age and of high-resolution images of the brain heralded a series of impressive breakthroughs. Changeux took part in one such advance in 1965 when, together with Jacques Monod and Jeffries Wyman, he established an important model of protein interactions in bacteria, which, when applied to the brain, became crucial for understanding the behavior of neurons. Since that time, Changeux has written a number of books exploring the functions of the brain. The brain is of course tremendously complex: a bundle of some hundred billion neurons, or nerve cells, each sharing as many as ten thousand connections with other neurons.

In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight named after me from the electronics firm Saitek. It illustrates the state of computer chess at the time that it didn't come as much of a surprise when I achieved a perfect 32–0 score, winning every game, although there was an uncomfortable moment. At one point I realized that I was drifting into trouble in a game against one of the "Kasparov" brand models. If this machine scored a win or even a draw, people would be quick to say that I had thrown the game to get PR for the company, so I had to intensify my efforts. Eventually I found a way to trick the machine with a sacrifice it should have refused. From the human perspective, or at least from my perspective, those were the good old days of man vs. machine chess. Eleven years later I narrowly defeated the supercomputer Deep Blue in a match.

Guests: Rodney Brooks * Author, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (Pantheon, 2002) * Chairman and CTO, iRobot Corporation * Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science * Director, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology * Cambridge, Massachusetts Gaby Wood * Staff Feature Writer, London Observer * Author, Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) * London, England This week, an automated convenience store opened in Washington. From housekeeping to the battlefield to your neighborhood convenience store, researchers are creating robots to live with us and work for us. In this hour, we'll look at how robots may change our lives. Plus, early attempts to create mechanical life.

Researchers at Cornell University have developed a soft robotic hand with a touch delicate enough to sort tomatoes and find the ripest one. Researchers at Cornell University have developed a soft robotic hand with a touch delicate enough to sort tomatoes and find the ripest one. Robotics researchers at Cornell University made a hand that has something close to a human touch -- it can not only touch delicate items but also sense the shape and texture of what it comes into contact with. Such a soft robot hand is a step forward for the growing field of soft robotics -- the kind of technology that's already used in warehouses to handle food or other products. But it also holds promise for better prosthetics, robots to interact directly with people or with fragile objects, or robots to squeeze into tight spaces.