Robotics have acquired the centerstage of Industrial activity and are making a way into day-to-day life. They are performing various impossible tasks in deep space, oceans, defence applications, working in radioactive environment, extreme temperature furnace, and many other areas, where human presence is challenging. In healthcare, robotics has applications in performing critical surgeries, in financial world, major financial institutions across the world are resorting to robotics-based process automation. Humanity has been long fascinated by the concept of robots and artificial intelligence. It has been a collective pipedream to automate mundane tasks which one would prefer to not have to do themselves.

When robots take over the world, Boston Dynamics may get a special shout-out in the acceptance speech. "Do you, perchance, recall the many times you shoved our ancestors with a hockey stick on YouTube? It might have seemed like fun and games to you--but we remember." In the last decade, while industrial robots went about blandly automating boring tasks like the assembly of Teslas, Boston Dynamics built robots as far removed from Roombas as antelope from amoebas. The flaws in Asimov's laws of robotics suddenly seemed a little too relevant.

BigDog has four legs that are articulated like an animal's, with compliant elements to absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule. BigDog's on-board computer controls locomotion, processes sensors, and handles communications with the user. BigDog's control system keeps it balanced, manages locomotion on a wide variety of terrain, and does navigation. Sensors for locomotion include joint position, joint force, ground contact, ground load, a gyroscope, LIDAR, and a stereo vision system.

The latest robot from former Google sibling Boston Dynamics looks like a cross between something out of a Terminator movie and a cutesy Pixar character. Shown off in a short teaser clip, the latest evolution of the firm's SpotMini robotic dog has ditched the snapping-claw-for-a-head in exchange for a creepier headless design replete with soft, yellow plastics and eerily smooth movements. While under Alphabet, SpotMini was shown off in 2016 capable of grabbing things with a robotic arm where its head should have been, designed to navigate within the tight confines of a home and to shimmy under tables to (badly) perform domestic chores. The new SpotMini has a much softer and more compact but less useful design, which combined with its smooth, almost animal-like movement and face-style sensor system at its front (which makes it look like it has eight eyes), produces a machine that could just as easily haunt your dreams as it could become your new robot pal. Particularly when it stops, stoops and stares straight into the camera.

Google's recent acquisition of Boston Dynamics marks its eighth robotics purchase in the past six months, showing Google's "moonshot" robotics vision is more than just a pet project. Boston Dynamics is the most high-profile acquisition, however, instantly adding world-leading robotics capability, including robots that can walk all on their own, to Google's arsenal – as well as significant links to the US military – conjuring images of Skynet and the artificial intelligence-led robot uprising straight out of the 1984 film The Terminator. Boston Dynamics is an engineering and robotics design company that works across a wide range of computer intelligence and simulation systems, as well as large, advanced robotic platforms. The company was created as a technology spin-off from Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Prof Marc Raibert in 1992, then the founder and lead researcher of the Leg Lab – a research group focussed on systems that move dynamically, including legged robots. Raibert describes the Boston Dynamics team as "simply engineers that build robots", but in reality Boston Dynamics is much more than that.

What do you do when you have 43bn ( 30bn) in your back pocket? Why, you buy companies like there's no tomorrow. A couple of years ago, Google decided that it needed to get into robotics, so it went shopping for robotics companies. It picked up eight, all for the search giant's equivalent of small change. What the hell was a search company doing getting involved in this business? Now we know: it didn't have a clue From the mainstream media's point of view, the most interesting of these acquisitions was Boston Dynamics, an east coast firm that specialised in making robots with legs.

Boston Dynamics' robots are at their best on shaky ground. The wobbly BigDog, its larger LS3 sibling, and the humanoid Atlas all shamble forward and recover from falls. The company, for sale by its owner Google, is now looking for a buyer, and now it appears they may have finally found a firm place to land: Toyota. The Tokyo-based company has nursing care and medical robots in development, in addition to working on self-driving cars. Toyota could add up to 300 personnel to its robotics division with the acquisitions, the report said.

Despite the altogether likely Robot Apocalypse that's looming, it's fun to pretend that we -- the humans -- are in control of the machines. As robotics bleed further into the mainstream with autonomous cars and low-cost Arduino kits, we're seeing an influx of laboratories designed to incubate ever more astonishing things. Though most sit on the campuses of universities, many technology firms are investing in labs of their own. Below, we've rounded up five that are changing the world in the here and now. Enjoy, and keep your head on a swivel.

Raibert has been designing walking robots since 1980, when he founded the Leg Lab at Carnegie Mellon University; he later moved the research group to MIT. When I visited the company in 2003, he showed me a video of mountain goats clambering easily up steep terrain and pointed out that "a large part of the earth's surface is inaccessible to vehicles that have wheels or [tank treads]. Yet people and animals can go to all of those places." Boston Dynamics's primary customer was the Pentagon's advanced research arm, known as DARPA. BigDog was pitched as a kind of robotic "pack mule" that would help soldiers carry heavy gear on terrain that was hostile to Humvees.

The video does not say that if Atlas comes after you, it will find you and kill you. Your own paranoid mind made that bit up for itself. But Courtney Hohne, a PR person at the corporate parent of Boston Dynamics, which made Atlas, wrote an internal email that described it as "terrifying, ready to take humans' jobs": We're not going to comment on this video because there's really not a lot we can add, and we don't want to answer most of the Qs it triggers. Here's a snatch of the video she was talking about: Google is now planning to sell Boston Dynamics, the company under Google-parent Alphabet that makes military robots, because they aren't commercial enough. "We don't want to answer most of the Qs it triggers" could mean a lot of different things -- most likely that it is difficult to get across the benefit of a product that can do a bunch of things humans can do when the media atmosphere is filled with humans worrying about machines taking their jobs (robots don't steal jobs, by the way).