Singapore's plan to put autonomous vehicles (AVs) on the roads here was praised by global robotics expert Ayanna Howard, who raised questions about the way AV tests are currently conducted overseas. A former Nasa researcher named by Forbes magazine as one of the top 50 women in tech in the United States, Dr Howard also said there is a need to consider the human factor in testing AVs. "A lot of times, with self-driving cars, the issue is that other cars are driven by humans. Most humans don't always follow traffic rules exactly. In a test done in California, drivers would stop, then go, because they wanted to see what the self-driving car would do," said the 47-year-old professor and chair of interactive computing at Georgia Tech in the US.

Welcome to the Uncanny Valley. Sounds like a spooky, scary place to live – and that's certainly true – but it's more of a state of mind. Anyone who has been freaked out by the robots in Channel 4's new hit drama Humans knows what life in the Uncanny Valley feels like. The same goes for those who have met or seen footage of Aiko Chihira, a realistic humanoid who has just started welcoming visitors to a department store in Japan. Aiko and Anita, the renegade Synth in Humans, are both sufficiently lifelike to be approachable but sufficiently inhuman to be deeply unsettling, speaking to our deepest fears about robots taking over our lives.

Kinba has only just started on the front desk of King's College but the students are already in love with their new receptionist who can see, hear and have a stab at speaking. Under normal circumstances that would be unremarkable – but Kinba is a robot. Kinba, who has yet to be assigned a gender, took up its new post last week alongside the London university's existing – human – receptionist Camilla Templing at its building on the Strand. "Kinba's generated a real buzz of excitement about the place, to see it moving and speaking. People are coming and taking pictures and talking to it," Ms Templing says.