Tickets are £15 for adults (with donation), £13 for concessions. Family tickets are available and there is free entry for children aged seven and under. All tickets are for designated time slots to help us manage visitor numbers during busy times. Special rates apply for pre-booked group visits – find out more about group bookings. Robots is open until 22.00 every Friday (last entry at 21.00) and also at Lates on the last Wednesday of each month.

In an era of heightened fears about killer robots, teaching them martial arts may seem unwise. But researchers have now shown a robot how to flip nunchucks to demonstrate an intuitive approach for teaching complex manual tasks. The group built a bionic hand and a motion-capture glove that can be used to teach the robot by demonstration, a popular method for skills requiring dexterity. But that's like learning from a silent teacher, the engineers say in research uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, so they devised an approach closer to how humans are taught. First, the teacher explains each step of the trick using an intuitive symbolic flow chart called a Petri net.

She and her students have also programmed a TurtleBot they call Resolution Bot, a play on the New Year's resolution because it acts as a health coach. At the beginning of the year, the robot visited professors and students to ask how they were feeling. The robot would then count out exercises for the person to do, such as push-ups, or go on a walk with the person. The robot also carried bananas and other healthy snacks to offer the people. The robot was remote controlled by students, who developed ways to animate the robot more, such as having the robot nod when it counted out exercises or move toward the person if they put their hand up for a high five.

Since 1997, we have researched teams of soccer robots using the Sony AIBO robots as the robot platform (Veloso & Uther 1999; Veloso et al. 2000; Lenser, Bruce, & Veloso 2001a; 2001b; Uther et al. 2002). Our experience runs across several generations of these four-legged robots and we have met increasing success every year. In the fall of 2003, we created a new course building upon our research experience with the AIBO robots. The course, which we entitled CMRobo-Bits, introduces students to all the concepts needed to create a complete intelligent robot. We focus on the areas of perception, cognition, and action and use the Sony AIBO robots to help the students to understand in depth the issues involved in developing such capabilities in a robot.

You're hungry, you're parched, you're terrified of the outside world, and the prospect of moving off of your bean bag is a true impossibility. What is there to do? Ladies and gents, meet the Snackbot. On Thursday, PepsiCo announced that is is rolling out a fleet of R2D2-lookin' robots at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif. The robots are basically cute vending machines that can roll around campus on their own. They look a lot like a cooler on wheels, and students can order the robots to deliver snacks to them from PepsiCo's Hello Goodness line via an app.