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.

Cast: Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O'Connor, Brendan Gleeson, William Hurt It's the late 21st Century and the world is no longer our own. The oceans have risen up and taken over the land. New York, once the summit of man's achievements, is submerged, its skyscrapers barely peeking above the surface of the water, its amusement parks drowned like tacky Antlantises. Man has moved on though, and discovered a new achievement: life. Buildings are easy – bricks and mortar moulded into an appropriate shape.

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?

In a crisis control center, several teams of firefighters in Montelibretti, Italy, used laptops to guide a robotic ground vehicle into a smoke-filled highway tunnel. Inside, overturned motorcycles, errant cars, and spilled pallets impeded the robot's progress. The rover, equipped with a video camera and autonomous navigation software, was capable of crawling through the wreckage unguided while humans monitored the video footage for accident victims. But most of the time the firefighters took manual control once the robot was a few meters into the tunnel. Although the search was just an experiment, microphones recorded clear signs of stress during several tests of the scenario: The firefighter driving the rover spoke at a higher pitch, and members of some teams also interfered with one another's radio transmissions.

Mobileye, the Israeli car automation company that came onto the self-driving car scene as sort of an anti-Google, is now looking at the future in terms that seem a bit closer to Google's than used to be the case. Speaking Friday at a conference organized by Goldman Sachs (which owned a chunk of Mobileye's shares when the company first became publicly traded in 2014), Amnon Shashua, Mobileye's founder and chief technical officer, placed a lot of emphasis on mapping, something Google has done all along. And now Shashua is predicting utterly hands-free driving--if only on the highway--by 2021. Mobileye had always emphasized incremental steps, such as active cruise control and emergency braking, collectively called advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). It was Google that proposed to skip all half measures and get right to full-bore self-driving cars.

Stepping out of the elevator on the seventh floor of Carnegie Mellon University's Gates Center for Computer Science, I'm greeted by an ungainly yet courteous robot. It guides me to the office of Manuela Veloso, who beams at the bot like a proud parent. Veloso then punches a few buttons to send it off to her laboratory a few corridors away. Veloso, a computer science professor at CMU, in Pittsburgh, has worked for over two decades to develop such autonomous mobile robots. She believes that humans and robots will one day coexist, and my robot escort, named CoBot (for Collaborative Robot), is one of her contributions to that future.

The rising interest in quadrupeds over the past few years has led to the development of several exciting new projects based on Cheetahs. One such robot is Cheetah-Cub, a compliant quadruped developed at the Biorobotics lab at the EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. To put Cheetah-Cub in motion, the EPFL group teamed up with researchers from the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), who have recently managed to transfer horse-like locomotion to the robot. EPFL's Cheetah-Cub quadruped, which weighs just 1.1 kg (2.4 lb) and is about the size of a housecat, is powered by Kondo KRS2350 hobby servos. It's a compliant robot that, like IIT's COMAN humanoid, is part of the AMARSi (Adaptive Modular Architectures for Rich Motor Skills) project, which seeks to "improve biological richness of robotic motor skills."