Dogs have always had a role in combat but now they are helping engineers build better robots. Dogs are now in the field wearing high-tech bulletproof vests, parachutes and video cameras into combat. Rolling robots are getting stronger, smarter and smaller. Robots are being made to be more dog-like and dogs are being trained to be methodical, like robots. From infantry units to secret SEAL teams, the U.S. military is using increasing numbers of dogs and robots to assist in conflicts across the world.

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.

Just when you thought you might be able to outrun the Cougar20-H surveillance robot that can detect human breathing, developer TiaLinx has launched a flying version that can do the same. The Phoenix40-A is a mini-UAV with six rotors that can detect motion and breathing when searching for hidden people. Like the Cougar20-H, it has an ultra-wideband radio frequency sensor array and can also detect motionless live objects. It also has video cameras for site surveillance. Developed with U.S. Army funding, the Phoenix unmanned aerial vehicle can be remotely controlled from ground or air with a laptop or joystick, and can fly to multiple GPS points on its missions.

The robo-pocalypse concept is still good for a laugh, as the toughest autonomous robots out there are shaped like Frisbees and suck the dust off your floor for a living. But deep in the bowels of the military research complex, scientists are working hard to wipe that grin off your face. The latest sign is a Navy plan to develop swarms of micro-robots that can build things all on their own, including other robots. Yes, we're talking about the tipping point when robots don't need us anymore. The Navy is looking to leverage desktop manufacturing technology--think 3D printing--to make swarms of tiny, efficient factories that create new materials and can be choreographed to build and assemble "high-value components."

Well, the U.S. military has reportedly commissioned the production of bipedal soldiers and quadruped robots that can outrun human beings. Boston Dynamics, known for its BigDog canine bot, is working to develop a humanoid robot called Atlas and an animal-like running robot called Cheetah. The robo-cat is due to arrive in 20 months. The company's efforts are part of multimillion-dollar contracts with DARPA over a four-year period, according to a Boston Herald report. Initially, Cheetah is supposed to achieve speeds of up to 30 mph.

NASA's tough-looking Robonaut 2 is slated to ride the Space Shuttle Discovery into orbit this month, and now Japan says it wants to shoot its own humanoid robot to the International Space Station too. Japan's space agency JAXA says it may put a humanoid on the ISS in 2013 so it can watch over crew members while they sleep and monitor their health and stress levels. Engineers at the University of Tokyo and staff at advertising giant Dentsu apparently are working on the space droid. It would be intended for communication--sending pics to Earth via Twitter and boosting public interest in the ISS. NASA, on the other hand, wants humanoid robots to perform tasks on space walks in the future. "We are thinking in terms of a very human-like robot that would have facial expressions and be able to converse with the astronauts," JAXA's Satoshi Sano was quoted as saying by the Associated Press.

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.

If you want to creep past this new security bot, you'd better be good at holding your breath. TiaLinx's new Cougar20-H is a lightweight, remote-controlled surveillance robot that can detect human breathing and scan through concrete walls with its ultra-wideband radio frequency sensor array. The Cougar20-H moves around on tracks and can roll up to a building, extend its arm, and start scanning through the wall with its RF array, developed with funding from the U.S. Army. Operated from a laptop that can be more than 300 feet away, the robot can scan through reinforced concrete by detecting reflected radio waves. It can find people who are moving or even keeping still, so the operator can see them in real time.

Bipedal robots taking pogo-like leaps may be the future of moon exploration, according to an idea the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency intends to test in practice. The moon's gravity is roughly one-sixth that on Earth, which has made it hard for astronauts to maintain their balance as they tried to keep their feet on the planet's surface while walking around. The phenomenon is perhaps best associated in the popular mind with footage taken in 1969 of astronaut Neil Armstrong taking gravity-defying leaps on the moon. But JAXA, which is among the Japanese agencies that wants to send humanoid robot explorers to the moon in lieu of humans, believes the "pogo jumping" style would be the best way for the machines to carry out future explorations. Atsuo Takanishi of Tokyo's Waseda University is developing a software simulation of the Wabian-2R to test how a bipedal robot would fare under moon-like conditions.

PlayStations have seen plenty of army action with games like Call of Duty: Black Ops. Now they're doing real-life military duty as part of the Condor Cluster, a U.S. Air Force supercomputer whose off-the-shelf components include more than 1,700 Sony PS3 processors. The computer--which will undertake a range of tasks including synthetic aperture radar enhancement, image enhancement, and pattern recognition research--also incorporates 168 separate graphical processing units. It's capable of computing about 500 trillion calculations per second, which makes it some 50,000 times faster than the average laptop. As such, the Condor can read a whopping 20 pages of information per second.