Robots have progressed over the years from clunky hunks of metal to complex, AI-enabled machines capable of running, speaking, and even painting pictures. But even with all those advances humans still can't help but place robots in bizarre and uncomfortable situations. This year, researchers took advanced robots and had them clean up karate-chopped Coke cans, suck up cigarette butts, wear a fleshy, lab-grown face, and pick up dog poo. Two-legged, humanoid robots, which could one day work on factory floors, were gut-punched and forced to wear festive clothes while performing acrobatics. Here are just a few of the oddest things we did to robots this year.

Cigarette butts pose a huge risk to the world's oceans and can be a pain to clean up by hand especially on public spaces like beaches. A group of Italian scientists have built a quadruped robot that can identify litter and pick up the smaller bits with its leg mounted vacuums. VERO, the vacuum equipped quadruped robot, is a four-legged device designed to look for and clean up litter on a variety of terrains. VERO was designed and built by a team of researchers from the Dynamic Legged Systems lab at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, according to USA Today. The group published a paper back in April on VERO's development and effectiveness in the Journal of Field Robotics. The research paper states that cigarette butts are a serious concern.

Artificial Intelligence has catapulted in recent years, and the advancements being made in this field make me feel as if it won't be long before we have robots walking amongst us all the time! There was a point in time when the only forms of robots that we could see were toys or vacuum cleaners, or if we were lucky an AI-enabled lawnmower in some tech-trendy individual's backyard! But we have come a long long way since then. From a basketball-playing Japanese robot at the Tokyo 2021 Olympics to a Microsoft-powered robot that cleans up littered cigarette butts on the beach – the potential and scope of robots grow exponentially day by day. The world at large is slowly moving away from the perception of robots as evil beings who want to take over the Earth, and accepting that they may have vast and undeniable utility in even our day-to-day lives.

The World Economic Forum, in collaboration with the World Resources Institute, convenes the Friends of Ocean Action, a coalition of leaders working together to protect the seas. From a programme with the Indonesian government to cut plastic waste entering the sea to a global plan to track illegal fishing, the Friends are pushing for new solutions.

This little dude is doing good work. Until we can get the human race to stop tossing its trash in places it's not supposed to be, people continue to get creative picking it up. That's exactly the case for Martijn Lukaart and Edwin Bos, two Dutch engineers who started TechTics and built what you see here: BeachBot, or BB for short. With help from Microsoft's artificial intelligence systems, BB is on a mission to rid beaches of cigarette butts and eventually hopes to clean up all other sorts of waste. Microsoft highlighted the startup on Monday, showing off the prototype machine that's still in the process of learning via the software giant's Trove AI system, which helps provide image sets for this kind of machine learning task.

I explain Artificial Intelligence terms and news to non-experts. Wildfires are more and more present in modern society, mainly caused by heat waves, lightning, droughts, climate change, or even human actions like car fires, or cigarette butts. We've seen it everywhere recently Brazil, Australia, United States, Canada, etc., destroying plant, human, and animal life, property damage, and contributing to global warming through the high amount of CO2 produced. But thanks to AI, we may be able to spot these fires much sooner and take action sooner. Here's how artificial intelligence can be used to reduce fire detection time from an average of 40 minutes to less than five minutes!