Toys, crafts, lab kits, and more for the young loved ones in your life. In theory, buying gifts for children is a snap. If they're old enough to talk, but not old enough to ignore you completely, they will likely tell you what they want. And, if your kids run in the same kinds of circles as mine, they all seem to want the same things: fidget rings, slime, a Labubu key chain, a Squishmallow, a Sephora gift card, a digital wad of Robux, a hoverboard, and maybe a puppy. The adult who strives for a more bespoke level of gift-giving--or simply to find something with no connection to screens, mirrors, or fads--risks coming off as presumptuous and pretentious.

While it may be a bit premature to expect collaborative humanoid robots to be doing anything useful in a warehouse environment, the only way we're going to make it happen is by encouraging the difficult transition between research labs and industry. The European Union is doing a pretty good job of providing support for things like this through its Horizon 2020 program, and one of the projects it's supporting is called SecondHands, intended to "design a robot that can offer help to a maintenance technician in a pro-active manner… as a second pair of hands that can assist the technician when he/she is in need of help." SecondHands is a collaboration between Ocado (a U.K. company that operates highly automated warehouses), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (which has a bunch of experience building capable humanoid robots), and other research institutions including EPFL, UCL, and Sapienza University of Rome. Together, they're using the first prototype of the SecondHands collaborative robot, which also happens to be the sixth version of ARMAR, and one that's ready (we hope) to do something practical. ARMAR was created by Professor Tamim Asfour and his team at the High Performance Humanoid Technologies Lab (H²T) at KIT's Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics.

Ocado plans to wheel out Star Wars-style C-3PO humanoid robots at its warehouses as early as 2025. The'SecondHands' robots will pass spanners and move ladders to workers using artificial intelligence and speech recognition. Ocado has already built a prototype, marking the latest move from the online grocery specialist to cut its reliance on human workers. Ocado plans to wheel out Star Wars-style C-3PO humanoid robots at its warehouses as early as 2025. The'SecondHands' androids will pass spanners and move ladders to workers using artificial intelligence and speech recognition.

Robots across the world help out in factories by taking on heavy lifting or repetitive jobs, but the walking, talking kind may soon collaborate with people, thanks to European robotics researchers building prototypes that anticipate human actions. 'Ideally robots should be able to sense interactional forces, like carrying a table with someone,' said Francesco Nori, who coordinates the EU-funded An.Dy project which aims to advance human-robot collaboration. '(Robots) need to know what the human is about to do and what they can do to help.' In any coordinated activity, whether dancing or lifting a table together, timing is crucial and that means a robot needs to anticipate before a person acts. 'Today, robots just react – half a second of anticipation might be enough,' said Nori, who works at the Italian Institute of Technology which is renowned for its humanoid robot called iCub, that will be educated in human behaviour from data collected during the An.Dy project.