Boston Dynamics The desire to make robots seem gentle and appealing is not foremost among Boston Dynamics' priorities. Its thuggish looking creations, usually inspired by an animal, have largely been developed for the US military, for purposes which are delicately described as "search and rescue" tasks. Boston Dynamics has also developed a humanoid prototype called Atlas, which is able to, in the company's words, "lift, carry and manipulate the environment" Schaft If Meka is providing the foundations for the top half of Google's robot, Schaft may offer the bottom. The Japanese designed robot, which stays balanced even when jostled, trounced its rivals at a recent robotics competition held by the US department of defence. Redwood Robotics Comprising of the amalgamated expertise of three major developers, including Meka, focused on the elusive goal of developing a fully functioning robotic arm.

One of the UK's most congested highways, connecting the busy container port at Felixstowe to Birmingham, is to become Britain's first internet-connected road in a pilot project that could pave the way for everything from tolls to self-driving cars. A network of sensors will be placed along a 50-mile stretch of the A14 in a collaboration between BT, the Department for Transport and the Cambridge start-up Neul, creating a smart road which can monitor traffic by sending signals to and from mobile phones in moving vehicles. The technology, which sends signals over the white spaces between television channels instead of mobile phone networks, could even pave the way for government systems to automatically control car speeds. The telecoms watchdog Ofcom, which on Wednesday approved the project as part of its new blueprint for how Britain will use spectrum, is already forecasting what high technology traffic systems will look like. "Sensors in cars and on the roads monitor the build-up of congestions and wirelessly send this information to a central traffic control system, which automatically imposes variable speed limits that smooth the flow of traffic," Ofcom said.

Google's recent acquisition of Boston Dynamics marks its eighth robotics purchase in the past six months, showing Google's "moonshot" robotics vision is more than just a pet project. Boston Dynamics is the most high-profile acquisition, however, instantly adding world-leading robotics capability, including robots that can walk all on their own, to Google's arsenal – as well as significant links to the US military – conjuring images of Skynet and the artificial intelligence-led robot uprising straight out of the 1984 film The Terminator. Boston Dynamics is an engineering and robotics design company that works across a wide range of computer intelligence and simulation systems, as well as large, advanced robotic platforms. The company was created as a technology spin-off from Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Prof Marc Raibert in 1992, then the founder and lead researcher of the Leg Lab – a research group focussed on systems that move dynamically, including legged robots. Raibert describes the Boston Dynamics team as "simply engineers that build robots", but in reality Boston Dynamics is much more than that.

You may not have noticed it, but over the past year Google has bought eight robotics companies. Its most recent acquisition is an outfit called Boston Dynamics, which makes the nearest thing to a mechanical mule that you are ever likely to see. It's called Big Dog and it walks, runs, climbs and carries heavy loads. It's the size of a large dog or small mule – about 3ft long, 2ft 6in tall, weighs 240lbs, has four legs that are articulated like an animal's, runs at 4mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rubble, climbs muddy hiking trails, walks in snow and water, carries a 340lb load, can toss breeze blocks and can recover its balance when walking on ice after absorbing a hefty sideways kick. There, you will find not only a fascinating video of Big Dog in action, but also confirmation that its maker has a menagerie of mechanical beasts, some of them humanoid in form, others resembling predatory animals.

The United Nations has been warned that its protracted negotiations over the future of lethal autonomous weapons – or "killer robots" – are moving too slowly to stop robot wars becoming a reality. Lobbying for a pre-emptive ban on the weapons is intensifying at the UN general assembly in New York, but a deal may not emerge quickly enough to prevent devices from being deployed, experts say. "There is indeed a danger now that [the process] may get stuck," said Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. "A lot of money is going into development and people will want a return on their investment," he said. "If there is not a pre-emptive ban on the high-level autonomous weapons then once the genie is out of the bottle it will be extremely difficult to get it back in."

It is predicted that driverless cars will prevent the vast majority of crashes and dramatically reduce the cost of insuring a car, according to industry experts. Volvo's chief executive will tell a seminar on driverless cars on Tuesday that autonomous vehicles are the "single most important advance in automotive safety" in years. The Swedish carmaker's boss, Håkan Samuelsson, will cite US government research predicting that driverless cars will lead to an 80% fall in the number of car crashes by 2035. Even when an accident cannot be avoided, the impact speed will also drop due to automatic crash avoidance systems, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The result will be a huge decrease in the cost of car insurance premiums, according to separate research by insurer Swiss Re and the technology group Here. Premiums in the 14 largest car markets in the world are set to drop by $20bn (£13.5bn) by 2020 alone, according to their projections.

On Saturday at a NASCAR track in Florida, a humanoid robot named SCHAFT, created by a team of engineers from the University of Tokyo, performed a series of emergency tasks including using a hose, drilling a hole into a wall, walking through doors and driving a golf cart. SCHAFT ran away from the competition, with only a robot from DOD-funded Boston Dynamics staying close. These two robots, along with six others from private companies and university labs around the world, performed these tasks under the watchful eye of DARPA, the secretive defense research branch of the U.S. military. DARPA said the purpose of the competition was to begin modeling a robot that could be used on the surface of Mars. But many suspected that DARPA sponsors the competition to advance the use of robots like those on the battlefield.

The ongoing battle for Mosul, one of the largest cities in Iraq, has involved thousands of government-backed troops and allied fighters steadily advancing on the last urban stronghold of the terror group ISIS. In addition to elite Iraqi counter-terrorism troops, battle-hardened Kurdish peshmerga fighters and U.S. air support, ISIS fighters are facing a unique foe in the form of a remotely controlled combat vehicle developed by two brothers in Baghdad. Dubbed "al-robot," the device is a four-wheeled armored vehicle, considerably smaller than a Humvee or tank, with a 12.7mm cannon and side-mounted 70mm rockets. The main gun is equipped with a thermal-imaging camera that allows the device to be used at night. It is being used in the field during the battle for Mosul by the Iraqi Army's Popular Mobilization Unit, which reported its first use on Tuesday. In a statement to Vice News affiliate Motherboard, the PMU said the robot would be used for three primary missions: "Nighttime hunter missions, daytime combat missions and all-day support role for any troops requiring it."

This week, the California Department of Motor Vehicles released its final regulations for the testing of autonomous vehicles on the roads of the state. They create a process for companies like Google, Nissan, Mercedes Benz, and the rest of the automakers to test out cars that can drive themselves under certain circumstances. By the end of the year, the DMV will issue an even more important set of regulations that will govern how the public can operate these cars. This is not an easy task, nor one that the regulators asked for. When the California legislature passed Senate Bill 1298 (Vehicle Code Section 38750), they tasked the agency with creating rules that would both encourage the development of autonomous vehicles while protecting the public.

Are robots capable of moral or ethical reasoning? The Office of Naval Research will award $7.5 million in grant money over five years to university researchers from Tufts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Brown, Yale and Georgetown to explore how to build a sense of right and wrong and moral consequence into autonomous robotic systems. "Even though today's unmanned systems are'dumb' in comparison to a human counterpart, strides are being made quickly to incorporate more automation at a faster pace than we've seen before," Paul Bello, director of the cognitive science program at the Office of Naval Research told Defense One. "For example, Google's self-driving cars are legal and in-use in several states at this point. As researchers, we are playing catch-up trying to figure out the ethical and legal implications. We do not want to be caught similarly flat-footed in any kind of military domain where lives are at stake."