What if there was a robot apocalypse? Before I answer this question, let me give you a little background on where I'm coming from. I'm by no means an expert, but I have some experience with robotics. My first job out of college was working on robots at NASA, and my undergraduate degree project was on robotic navigation. I spent my teenage years participating in FIRST Robotics, programming software bots to fight in virtual tournaments, and working on homemade underwater ROVs.

With the recent launch of MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, MIT News examines research with the potential to reshape medicine and health care through new scientific knowledge, novel treatments and products, better management of medical data, and improvements in health-care delivery. At the end of 2012, the National Public Radio show "Fresh Air" featured a segment in which its linguistics commentator argued that "big data" should be the word of the year. The term refers not only to the deluge of data produced by the proliferation of Internet-connected, sensor-studded portable devices but also to innovative techniques for analyzing that data; and big data has received a good deal of credit for Barack Obama's victory in the last presidential election. Certainly, the term was in heavy use around MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), which in 2012 launched a new big-data initiative called bigdata@CSAIL. Several of the researchers affiliated with bigdata@CSAIL are developing new techniques for processing medical data, to make it more accessible to both physicians and patients and to find correlations that could improve diagnosis or choice of therapies.

MIT researchers have built a wearable sensor system that automatically creates a digital map of the environment through which the wearer is moving. The prototype system, described in a paper slated for the Intelligent Robots and Systems conference in Portugal next month, is envisioned as a tool to help emergency responders coordinate disaster response. In experiments conducted on the MIT campus, a graduate student wearing the sensor system wandered the halls, and the sensors wirelessly relayed data to a laptop in a distant conference room. Observers in the conference room were able to track the student's progress on a map that sprang into being as he moved. Connected to the array of sensors is a handheld pushbutton device that the wearer can use to annotate the map.

MIT's version of the "robotoddler" is just the latest MIT entry in the world of robots that can move themselves in a variety of settings. There's still a long way to go before today's robots evolve into practical, everyday technologies, but even now, autonomous robotic vehicles developed at MIT are exploring uncharted or hazardous places, assisting troops in combat and performing household tasks. In addition to his well-known work on humanoid robots such as Kismet, Professor Rodney Brooks led the development of several robotic vehicles and co-founded a company, iRobot, that develops these machines commercially. Troops in Afghanistan use PackBots to explore enemy caves, and soldiers in Iraq use them to detect improvised explosive devices and inspect weapons caches. "In 20 years, we've gone from robots that can hardly maneuver around objects to ones that can navigate in unstructured environments," said Brooks, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Aeronautics researchers at MIT have developed a manned-to-unmanned aircraft guidance system that allows a pilot in one plane to guide another unmanned airplane by speaking commands in English. In a flight test, the pilotless vehicle, called a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), responded to sudden changes in plan and avoided unexpected threats en route to its destination, in real time. "The system allows the pilot to interface with the UAV at a high level--not just'turn right, turn left' but'fly to this region and perform this task,'" said Mario Valenti, a flight controls engineer for Boeing who is on leave to pursue a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. "The pilot essentially treats the UAV as a wingman," said Valenti, comparing the UAV to a companion pilot in a fighter-plane squadron. Tom Schouwenaars, a Ph.D. candidate in aeronautics and astronautics, and Valenti are principal researchers on the guidance system, which is part of the capstone demonstration of the Software Enabled Control (SEC) program. Professors Eric Feron and Jonathan How of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (aero/astro) are among the principal investigators on the SEC program.

The White House released a much-anticipated document entitled "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence." Sent from the Office of the President and the National Science and Technology Council Committee on Technology (or NSTC), the report is 58 pages of research, documentation, and recommendations on how the United States government plans to respond to artificial intelligence (AI) moving forward. The report was developed by the NSTC's Subcommittee on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, "which was chartered in May 2016 to foster interagency coordination, to provide technical and policy advice on topics related to AI, and to monitor the development of AI technologies across industry, the research community, and the Federal Government," according to the report. The NSTC hosted five public workshops, as well as putting out a public Request for Information. The information drawn from those six sources informed the eventual recommendations of the committee.

"Wear that blue-colored dress today, it matches your new shoes." "Go to Tahiti on vacation, there is a good price now for tickets for this destination." All of these pieces of advice and more come from AI assistants. A wide range of these assistants have emerged to make our lives better: big ones like Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and SoundHound and multiple startups that are trying to conquer the market. Alterrа, for example, will help you choose the country for your next vacation.

The Turing Center is a multidisciplinary research center at the University of Washington, investigating problems at the crossroads of natural language processing, data mining, Web search, and the Semantic Web. The Center was established in May 2005 with a multi-million dollar gift from the Utilika Foundation, which is augmented by federal research grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity as well as support from Google and the Washington Research Foundation.

But it was one giant leap for computer-kind, with a state of the art artificial intelligence system being given primary command of a spacecraft. Known as Remote Agent, the software operated NASA's Deep Space 1 spacecraft and its futuristic ion engine during two experiments that started on Monday, May 17, 1999. For two days Remote Agent ran on the on-board computer of Deep Space 1, more than 60,000,000 miles (96,500,000 kilometers) from Earth. The tests were a step toward robotic explorers of the 21st century that are less costly, more capable and more independent from ground control. A second remote agent experiment was conducted on Friday, May 21, starting at 7:15 a.m.