Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a topic of discussion and research for decades. However, it is only in recent years that we have seen significant advancements in this field. AI is now being used in various industries, including healthcare, finance, and transportation, to name a few. With these advancements and applications, it is clear that AI is here to stay and will shape the future in various ways. So, what does the future of AI look like?

In a high-tech lab on Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus in Baltimore, engineers have been building a robot that may be able to stitch back together the broken vessels in your belly and at some point maybe your brain, no doctor needed. The robot has a high-tech camera on one arm and a high-tech sewing machine on a second arm. "It's like park assist in a car," said Axel Krieger, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering in Hopkins' Whiting School of Engineering. This kind of suturing is performed more than a million times a year in surgeries around the country, said Krieger, part of a team developing the robot and senior author on a recent paper describing the technology in science robotics. The goal is to develop in the next several years a robot that makes the intricate and delicate work of suturing more consistent.

Until now, most advanced, small-scale robots followed a certain model: They tend to be built at the centimeter scale and have only one degree of freedom, which means they can only perform one movement. Not so with this new'bot, developed by scientists at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Boston University. It's built at the millimeter scale, and because it's made of flexible materials–easily moved by pneumatic and hydraulic power–the critter has an unprecedented 18 degrees of freedom. It's smaller and more dexterous than any of its tiny robotic peers–a significant step toward robots that will be able to perform tasks inside the human body. The engineers call the new technology MORPH, an acronym for Microfluidic Origami for Reconfigurable Pneumatic/Hydraulic. Using it to create a spider–or any other robotic critter–involves three different fabrication techniques.

Daniela Rus is a robot evangelist. She challenged a packed audience in the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex on Tuesday to imagine a world where robots free us to be more creative by taking care of all our physical tasks--from playing with our pets to performing surgery without an incision. As director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Rus delivered the inaugural lecture in Northeastern's Distinguished Speaker Series in Robots. "Imagine a world where you're being driven home by your autonomous car," said Rus. "Your car is connected to your refrigerator, which tells it what ingredients you need for dinner. The car is also connected to the grocery store, which is run by robots that fill your bags so they are ready when you drive up. Then you bring the food home to the robot cook and you happily let your children help in the kitchen even though they make a mess, because the mess will be taken care of by the cleaning robot."

Origami-inspired bots that can fold into a number of different shapes have been developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Doctors at Oxford University made medical history recently by successfully completing the first robot-assisted intraocular surgery. Robert MacLaren, Professor of Ophthalmology at the university, and his team managed to gently peel off a 1/1000th millimeter membrane from the inside of a patient's eye. To do so, the team relied on a cutting-edge medical device known as the Robotic Retinal Dissection Device, or R2D2. The R2D2, developed by Dutch medical robotics firm Preceyes BV, is designed to perform keyhole surgery, entering and exiting the eyeball through a single, sub-millimeter hole. What's more, it's built to be exceedingly steady, especially given the tight tolerances within which it works.