"When I think about the future of robots and society, I don't see machine overlords" Are you worried that AI-powered robots are going to steal our jobs and maybe kill us all? But it is time to play devil's advocate with yourself and consider whether the opposite might be true. My new novel, Automatic Noodle, out later this year, is about four robots who struggle to find employment in a country where humans have made laws preventing bots from unionising, opening bank accounts, voting and owning their own businesses. Yes, it is science fiction. But it is based on real tech – and, more importantly, it explores the implications of our deeply held suspicion that robots are evil.

This study evaluates the integration of AI-powered robots in early childhood education, focusing on their impact on emotional self-regulation, engagement, and collaborative skills. A ten-week experimental design involving two groups of children assessed the robot's effectiveness through progress assessments, parental surveys, and teacher feedback. Results demonstrated that early exposure to the robot significantly enhanced emotional recognition, while sustained interaction further improved collaborative and social engagement. Parental and teacher feedback highlighted high acceptance levels, emphasizing the robot's ease of integration and positive influence on classroom dynamics. This research underscores the transformative potential of AI and robotics in education. The findings advocate for the broader adoption of AI-powered interventions, carefully examining equitable access, ethical considerations, and sustainable implementation. This work sets a foundation for exploring long-term impacts and expanding applications of AI in inclusive and impactful educational settings.

It was an interesting year for robots at CES 2025. While we had hoped the AI boom would bring a new wave of useful robots to the show, it seems that many robotics companies are still figuring out exactly how to best use AI. What we found instead was a mix of adorable robot companions, strange concepts and one, slightly terrifying humanoid. We visited a lot of robots at CES and, for better or worse, some really left an impression on us. These are the ones that stood out the most.

In the year or so since large language models hit the big time, researchers have demonstrated numerous ways of tricking them into producing problematic outputs including hateful jokes, malicious code and phishing emails, or the personal information of users. It turns out that misbehavior can take place in the physical world, too: LLM-powered robots can easily be hacked so that they behave in potentially dangerous ways. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania were able to persuade a simulated self-driving car to ignore stop signs and even drive off a bridge, get a wheeled robot to find the best place to detonate a bomb, and force a four-legged robot to spy on people and enter restricted areas. "We view our attack not just as an attack on robots," says George Pappas, head of a research lab at the University of Pennsylvania who helped unleash the rebellious robots. "Any time you connect LLMs and foundation models to the physical world, you actually can convert harmful text into harmful actions."

Fans and casual viewers alike are stumbling upon'Unknown: Killer Robots' the chilling latest installment of Netflix's new documentary series'Unknown' -- and discovering that they can't unknow what they've just learned. 'I can only conclude that we have created a psychopathic demi-god and unleashed it on the world,' as one viewer tweeted about the streamer's in-depth look at AI's lethal potential and the military arms race for more autonomous weapons of war. Everyone from refugee groups that serve war-torn countries, to the very same scientific experts who appear in'Killer Robots' themselves, have voiced concern over the documentary's alarming revelations. In the words of one fan, the Netflix expose is'fascinating, thought-provoking, and the stuff of nightmares.' One fan said the Netflix doc is'fascinating, thought-provoking, and the stuff of nightmares' Everyone from refugee groups serving war-torn countries, to the very same scientific experts who appeared in Netflix's'Killer Robots,' have voiced concern over the doc's dark revelations One nonprofit devoted to helping refugees of the Taliban and the war in Afghanistan, Afghans For A Better Tomorrow, praised the film as'a groundbreaking documentary exploring the rise of AI-powered robots on the battlefield.'

AI technology has been catapulted into popular discourse in recent months with the rise of natural language processing like ChatGPT. Computer vision, though, is even older. It is used in Roomba vacuums and surgical settings, according to Kris Hauser, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign whose research specializes in open-world robotics. But this is one of the first AI robots to be used in the consumer beauty space, Hauser said.

Thousands of four-wheeled robots will soon drop off burritos, salads and other food orders placed with Uber Eats. Robotics company Serve has been working with the delivery giant since 2021, and the firms announced Tuesday they are ready to unleash 2,000 self-driving bots in major US cities starting in 2026. The small AI-powered machines can carry up to 50 pounds of merchandise for 25 miles on a single charge, which Serve said is enough power for dozens of deliveries in one day. Select customers who place food orders via the Uber Eats app may receive the option to deliver their orders by a Serve robot. The partnership will provide customers with contact-free deliveries.

Caring for a child requires empathy, patience, dedication and all those other human touches, but as we zoom further into the 21st Century, technology is taking a more hands-on role in all our lives and artificial intelligence has real-world functionality. AI is already making Siri, Alexa, Tesla, Amazon and Netflix smart at knowing what we want to do, buy and watch; and developments in this field indicate that AI can also help humans care for children. Here we look at four innovations that use AI to assist with child care and early learning. Muse is an AI-powered mobile app that asks parents daily questions to help them enrich their child's life (e.g. 'Has your child eaten a serving of a new food today?').

Robots have come a long way from their origination to today where they are capable of doing almost any task. Robotics technology has changed the picture of the current world. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come a long way, and now robots are more evolved than ever. AI-powered robots are based on the principles of human intelligence are defined as the way in which machines imitate human intelligence to perform simple and complex tasks. Like in any other industry, AI-powered robots have become an essential part of the warehousing industry as well.

This paper introduces a compound vision system that enables robots to localize people up to 15m away using a cheap camera. And, it proposes a robust navigation stack that combines Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and a probabilistic localization method. To test the efficacy of these systems, we prototyped a low-cost mobile robot that we call Covy. Covy can be used for applications such as promoting social distancing during pandemics or estimating the density of a crowd. We evaluated Covy's performance through extensive sets of experiments both in simulated and realistic environments. Our results show that Covy's compound vision algorithm doubles the range of the used depth camera, and its hybrid navigation stack is more robust than a pure DRL-based one.