Almost exactly a year ago, in April 2010, professional motocross rider Randy Childers sustained serious injuries after a crash in the last race of the day at Cowboy Badlands in West Beaumont, Texas. He suffered broken ribs and a fractured wrist, but most seriously a crushed vertebra in his neck (C3) that required him to be airlifted to Houston, where surgeons inserted an artificial vertebra and fused two others together (C4 and C5) during a marathon operation that lasted 12 hours. Today, the 24-year-old is the star in a single-patient trial of Rice University's RiceWrist robot, a wearable exoskeleton that mimics the joints from his shoulder to his hand. After months of traditional physical therapy, Childers had recovered enough by October to walk (albeit slowly) into the basement lab at Rice and begin to use the RiceWrist, which is built to reconnect motor pathways in the brain through repetitive movement. After just two weeks, Rice Professor Marcia O'Malley says, Childers was doing most of the work himself.

Could a computer replace this era's crop of clownish sportscasters like Dick Vitale or Lee Corso? We can dream--while a Swiss company works on software that could create artificial intelligence systems to call sporting events. Computer researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland are working on a system that can track multiple athletes on a football field, a basketball court, or a soccer pitch via multiple cameras and advanced scanning algorithms. These days, computers can track human athletes, racing cars, and other sporting elements via GPS. But that's illegal in many sports as the introduction of such technology threatens to overpower the human element of athletics.

"Secret Thoughts," a play by British novelist and playwright David Lodge, is introducing audiences to a hot new actor--Arthur the robot. Arthur comes onstage for about 20 seconds, scans the room, and collides with furniture in the production, which is described as "science against art, and morality against indulgence." In it, Ralph, a married, groundbreaking cognitive scientist, meets Helen, a recently bereaved novelist, and "sparks fly" (presumably not from the robot short-circuiting). It's really just a walk-on (roll-on) part for the remote-controlled bot, who's made mostly of fiberglass. But it leads to a pivotal conversation between the characters about the emotional intelligence of robots.

The next step on the road to robo-domination is, apparently, juggling. From Switzerland's Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control comes this video of flying robots (quadrocopters) juggling a ball individually and in teams. The quadrocopters in the video are operated by humans (for now). They do, however, have onboard computers and are able to fly themselves if properly programmed. As humanity continues to propel itself toward the inevitable robot apocalypse, it's nice to know our future machine masters will at least be able to keep us entertained.

Is that a speck in your eye? Or just a microrobot helping preserve your vision? Researchers are working on tiny machines that can be directed through eyes to help treat conditions like macular degeneration, which can impair vision. Scientists at the Swiss-based Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IRIS) led by Bradley Nelson are developing tiny, electromagnetically controlled microrobots that can move to a target location in the eye and remain there for months, releasing drugs. The therapy is seen as an alternative to multiple eye injections to treat macular degeneration, which can lead to legal blindness.

Only six years after the film "Stealth," Northrop Grumman has demonstrated its much ballyhooed X-47B robot stealth plane, successfully completing a 29-minute test flight to 5,000 feet at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Developed under a $635 million Navy contract, the unmanned, tailless jet provides greater range and power by taking off from aircraft carriers, delivering laser-guided bombs and refueling in the air. The test flight, which had been expected to take place over a year ago, is a first step to demonstrating the plane on a carrier. Northrop Grumman now says that will happen in 2013 instead of this year. The plane can fly at a "high subsonic" top speed, much faster than UAVs such as the Predator and Reaper drones.

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.

Children too sick to go to school are still getting an education--thanks to robots in the classroom that transmit lessons back to the student. Stepan Supin, 12, of Moscow has been battling leukemia for two years, and his immune system is so weak he can't leave home. However, telepresence technology allows him to go to school via remote-controlled robot. The R.BOT 100 was developed by Moscow's 3Detection Labs several years ago, and it's been helping Stepan study history, geography, and languages since September. Priced at roughly $3,000, the R.BOT 100 moves around on a wheeled base and has a display, Web cam, microphone, speakers, and an Internet link so Stepan can interact with his classmates and teacher.

If you're keen on the idea of teleporting yourself into a distant robot body, French software maker Gostai is introducing a line of telepresence robots that run on a 3G connection in addition to Wi-Fi. That means you can drive your robot avatar down the Champs-Elysees, if you so fancy. Or anywhere with 3G service and flat surfaces, for that matter. But the Jazz bots are mainly for use in one location. They're Web browser-controlled, wheeled machines designed to project a user into a distant place.

He looks like a supporting character from classic comic strip Dan Dare, but there's nothing fictional about George the Robot. George was built in 1950 and is one of the first humanoid robots ever made. After 45 years powered down in a garden shed--how British--George is back online. George was created over the course of three weeks by former Royal Air Force officer Tony Sale, now 79. Having refined the design in four previous versions made of Meccano and cardboard, the then 19-year-old Sale built George in from aluminum and duralumin from a crashed Wellington bomber.