Apple is still on the hunt for the next revolutionary product to help it remain dominant in the market and to serve as new sources of revenue after abandoning its plans to develop an electric vehicle of its own. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, one of the areas the company is exploring is personal robotics. It reportedly started looking into robots and electric vehicles at the same time, with the hopes of developing a machine that doesn't need human intervention. While Apple's robotics projects are still in the very early stages, Bloomberg said it had already started working on a mobile robot that can follow users around their home and had already developed a table-top device that uses a robot to move a screen around. The idea behind the latter is to have a machine that can mimic head movements and can lock on to a single person in a group, presumably for a better video call experience.

Luxonis, a Colorado-based robotic vision platform, has launched rae, its first "fully-formed and high-powered personal robot". Backed by a Kickstarter campaign to help support its development, rae sets itself apart by offering a multitude of features right out of the box, along with a unique degree of experimental programming potential that far exceeds other consumer robots on the market. The most recent of a long line of Luxonis innovations, rae is designed to make robotics accessible and simple for users of any experience level. Brandon Gilles, CEO of Luxonis, says: "rae is representative of our foremost goal at Luxonis: to make robotics accessible and simple for anyone, not just the tenured engineer with years of programming experience. "A longstanding truth about robotics is that the barrier to entry sometimes feels impossibly high, but it doesn't have to be that way.

At last week's CES (Consumer Electronics Show), the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Centre were teeming with talking robots of all shapes and sizes. There were robots that clean, from ForwardX's autonomous lawnmower and Samsung's Bot Air that travels around a home purifying air to the self-deodorising LavvieBot, a self-cleaning litter box for cats. For dog-lovers, Sony's Aibo robot canine made a return to the annual Las Vegas event. For travellers, the useful Rover Speed and Ovis were on display; both are autonomous robot cases that follow their owners around an airport. Or you could choose to just dump your bags on the back of LG's Cloi CartBot, one of a suite of helpful robots that autonomously navigate, and come equipped with touch displays and voice recognition.

A growing number of tech companies are counting on people being willing to socialize with robots in their homes, like Vector a personal robot that goes on sale this week. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. A growing number of tech companies are counting on people being willing to socialize with robots in their homes, like Vector a personal robot that goes on sale this week.

Misty Robotics announced their developer platform, Misty I, just a few months ago. Misty I was a hand-built prototype, with similar essential functionality in hardware and software to a more refined production robot that the company planned to release later in the year. Later in the year has now arrived, and today Misty Robotics is launching a crowdfunding campaign for a much more polished personal robot, Misty II, which can be yours to program starting at $1,500. In theory, I can definitely appreciate this idea of a platform being what's holding useful personal robotics back. It's very appealing to think about, and it would be wonderful if true, with legions of independent developers who can't wait to work with something capable and accessible enough for them to program to do what they want it to do without any special training.

Get ready to say goodbye: Soon it will be obsolete. We're moving far beyond cars we drive to cars that drive us. In the next decade, cars will be highly cognitive, sophisticated mobility machines powered by AI. They will serve as drivers, navigators, and personal robots that assist us with everything we do. Cars of the future will learn, understand, and be able to reason and make informed, data-driven decisions that correlate the reams of data they collect on us -- their owners and riders -- with data on transportation, traffic, other automobiles, and a whole range of other sources.

In May of last year, Misty Robotics raised US $11.5 million and spun itself out of parent company Sphero. From the sound of things, Sphero cofounder Ian Bernstein had been working on an idea for a new kind of robot inside Sphero for a while, and Misty is the manifestation of that. Misty Robotics' vision is to put a personal robot in every home and office. These robots will be seen and treated as our friends, our teammates, and a part of our families--performing helpful tasks, providing safety, and interacting with humans in entertaining and friendly ways that have only been seen before in science fiction. Misty will begin its mission with the release of its first robot and a collaborative ecosystem for robotic development. That's quite a vision, especially in the context of the sky-high expectations that Jibo isn't (yet) living up to, and that Kuri may struggle to meet.

Jefferson Graham previews the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where new smart home products using technology from Google, Amazon and Apple will be unveiled. LAS VEGAS -- The trade show of the Consumer Electronics Show will open Tuesday, but we've got a sneak peek on some of the coolest technology set to debut at the world's biggest consumer trade show. Each year, the Consumer Technology Association, which stages the CES, selects 20 products for the CES Innovation Awards, "honoring outstanding design and engineering," in consumer tech products. And we've got the list. The categories are varied, everything from 3D printing, computer accessories, home appliances, home speakers, robots and cameras.

Is committed to a robotic future that empowers and enhances human abilities, enriches human experiences and delivers intuitive, reliable and fun products that are usable by all. We have worldwide HQs in San Francisco, New York, Tel-Aviv, Shenzhen, and Singapore. The temi team is making this vision a reality.

After decades on every sci-fi fan's wish list, personal robots are on the cusp of entering our homes. Now it's time to put them to work. Everyone knows Pepper, the child-sized humanoid robot launched back in 2014 who was created to welcome visitors to SoftBank Mobile stores in Japan. Now Pepper has scored a few jobs in the US, from giving directions in a shopping mall in San Francisco to pouring beer at Oakland International Airport's Pyramid Taproom. The diminutive Pepper is not alone, not even at airports.