While it might not always be easy to pull the plug on your electronics, doing so is rarely a case of moral dilemma. But, powering down might be a lot more difficult if your devices were begging you not to do it. A new study explores the ways in which social robots can manipulate their owners by pulling on our heartstrings. When robots protested, shouting things such as'No! Please do not switch me off' and implying they were afraid of the dark, participants hesitated and sometimes even refused to turn them off.

If you've been to the RoboGames, you've seen everything from flame-throwing battlebots to androids that play soccer. But robo-athletes are more than just performers. Researchers at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have built a small humanoid robot that plays baseball -- or something like it. The bot can hold a fan-like bat and take swings at flying plastic balls, and though it may miss at first, it can learn with each new pitch and adjust its swing accordingly. Eventually, it will make contact. The robot, you see, is also equipped with an artificial brain.

Autism Spectrum Disorder is a developmental disorder often characterized by limited social skills, repetitive behaviors, obsessions, and/or routines. Using the small humanoid robot NAO, we designed an interactive program to elicit common social cues from toddlers while in the presence of trained psychologists during standard toddler assessments.  Our program will capture three different videos of the child-robot interaction and create algorithms to analyze the videos and flag autistic behavior to make diagnosis easier for clinicians.  Our novel contributions will be automatic video processing and automatic behavior classification for clinicians to use with toddlers, validated on a large number of subjects and using a reproducible and portable robotic program for the NAO robot.