NASA's twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have already rewritten the book on the Red Planet's history, their amazing discoveries transmitted to an audience of millions. But is not content to let NASA rest on its laurels. She's designing future generations of robotic explorers to bring back even more science for the buck. Her goal: a robot that can be dropped off on a planet and wander around on its own, eliminating the kind of intense supervision from Earth that Spirit and Opportunity require--their every move must be meticulously choreographed in advance and on a daily basis. "I want to plop a rover on Mars and have it call back when it finds interesting science," Howard says.

Editor's note: Our story was based on the premise that the advanced radars discussed below were intended for autonmous cars. GM contacted IEEE Spectrum after publication to say that the radars are not intended for autonomous vehicles. The FCC filings referenced in the IEEE Spectrum story are not part of our autonomous vehicle development program. They are related to further advancement of technologies featured on our vehicles today. General Motors (GM) is likely building a fleet of 725 self-driving taxis for its partnership with Lyft, with an intended launch date of January 2019, according to documents filed with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Firefighting robots have been a hot topic recently, and the U.S. Navy seems particularly interested in getting shipboard robots to be able to help humans deal with flaming emergencies. They've already commissioned their own custom humanoid, but until that's ready to go, they're teaching Octavia how to team up with humans to find (and extinguish) real fires. The focus of this project is less about the actual fire extinguishing, and more about how Octavia interacts with a human partner to get to that point. She's already a pro with a fancy Macaw Compressed Air Foam anti-fire cannon, but she has to learn how to track a person, identify them, understand what they say, understand any gestures they make, recognize a fire when she sees one, and then accurately and efficiently put it out. Not a simple process, to be sure, but she seems to have it down, and notice in this video how her facial expressions communicate what she's thinking to her human partner: All of this, of course, assumes that the human part of the human-robot team is acting in a calm and logical manner, as opposed to running around screaming "FIRE!"

This article originally appeared in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Summer 2015). We thank the American Economic Association for giving us permission to reproduce it here. About half a billion years ago, life on earth experienced a short period of very rapid diversification called the "Cambrian Explosion." Many theories have been proposed for the cause of the Cambrian Explosion, with one of the most provocative being the evolution of vision, which allowed animals to dramatically increase their ability to hunt and find mates (for discussion, see Parker 2003). Today, technological developments on several fronts are fomenting a similar explosion in the diversification and applicability of robotics. Many of the base hardware technologies on which robots depend--particularly computing, data storage, and communications--have been improving at exponential growth rates. Two newly blossoming technologies--"Cloud Robotics" and "Deep Learning"--could leverage these base technologies in a virtuous cycle of explosive growth. In Cloud Robotics--a term coined by James Kuffner (2010)--every robot learns from the experiences of all robots, which leads to rapid growth of robot competence, particularly as the number of robots grows.

Editor's Note: This is part of IEEE Spectrum's ongoing coverage of Japan's earthquake and nuclear emergency. An anonymous worker at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant has written dozens of blog posts describing the ups and downs of his experience as one of the lead robot operators at the crippled facility. His blog provides a window into the complex and dangerous work environment faced by the operators, a small group of young technicians who, like other front-line personnel, must approach areas of high radiation, deploying remote-controlled robots to assist with efforts to further stabilize and shut down the plant's four troubled reactors. The blog posts, which have recently been deleted, depict the operators' extensive robot training exercises, as well as actual missions, including surveying damage and contamination in and around the reactors and improvising a robotic vacuum to suck up radioactive dust. The author, who goes by the initials S.H., also used the blog to vent ...

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the authors and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Last month, over 1,000 robotics and artificial intelligence researchers signed an open letter calling for a ban on offensive autonomous weapons, putting new energy into an already spirited debate about the role of autonomy in weapons of the future. These researchers join an ongoing conversation among lawyers, ethicists, academics, activists, and defense professionals on potential future weapons that would select, engage, and destroy targets without a human in the loop. As AI experts, the authors of the letter can help militaries better understand the risks associated with increasingly intelligent and autonomous systems, and we welcome their contribution to the discussion.

We've been posting a lot recently about military robotics, and having discussions about whether or not we should be scared of robots with weapons. One of the points that I made was that whatever we think of the military's pronounced interest in robots, it does end up paying for all kinds of things, and here is one amazing example that's funded by DARPA (among others): a 7 DoF brain-controlled robotic arm and hand that has allowed this woman take a bite of chocolate unassisted for the first time in a decade. Jan Scheuermann has had quadriplegia for the last ten years, which means that she can move her head and neck, but nothing lower down. She's part of a program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine which involved implanting electrodes directly into her brain, and using them to intercept brain signals that Jan can then use to control a robotic arm. The video is nine minutes long, but you won't be sorry to watch the entire thing, I promise.

Following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that crippled Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, Honda reportedly received numerous requests to send its humanoid robot ASIMO to help with the recovery. ASIMO, however, wasn't designed to work outside a lab or office environment, let alone a highly radioactive rubble-strewn zone. Now it looks like Honda is working to address the problem by developing a bigger, beefed-up version of ASIMO that can walk, crawl, and perform tasks in a disaster environment. After the Fukushima accident, many observers were surprised that Japan, a country known for its advanced robots, wasn't better prepared and had to rely on U.S. robots instead. In the months that followed, Japanese government agencies and companies got to work to develop capable disaster-response robots.

If your satellite isn't so far gone as to require harvesting and zombification by DARPA but could still use a tune-up, SpaceJustin the Space Robot is here to help. To feel with your own hands what the robotic hand is touching. To see exactly what the robot's eyes are seeing. Researchers from the Robotics and Mechatronics Center at the DLR site in Oberpfaffenhofen can now operate their SpaceJustin robot remotely; they not only control the robot, but receive feedback as well. In the future, this interactive service can be used when SpaceJustin is in space repairing satellites, operating switches or exchanging modules.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. The DARPA Robotics Challenge this past summer showcased how far humanoid robots have come--but also how far they have yet to go before they can tackle real-world practical applications. Even the best of the DRC behemoths stumbled and fell down, proving, as IEEE Spectrum noted at the time, that "not walking is a big advantage." There is, in fact, a new not-walking way for robots to perform many kinds of tasks better and faster: the dexterous drone.