But the design is smart, it pulses while animating the display, making you feel like the machine is an intelligent robot butler, making the soda perfect just for you.

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"Part of having your journalists on these platforms is giving them the freedom to be a normal human being, not a robot, a PR machine or a slave to the wire, " he blogged.

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But on a recent day in the institute's machine shop, he showed off the robot to which he has devoted much of his career.

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It may also be the only machine that keeps you alive when the Robot Apocalypse goes down, but we'll try to stuff that to the rear of our minds for now.

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But bringing it back to the new age-old question what is a robot, Bokhari believes a robot is an intelligent, autonomous machine capable of doing a range of specialized tasks.

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The control programs have been used to create control systems for a bipedal robot and a visual recognition system for a robot that works even when the machine is distracted by flashing lights and shadows.

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Since the days of Alan Turing, the promise of a digital computer has been that of a universal machine, one that can be a word processor one minute and a robot brain the next.

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Clearing a path to the market soon will be the Winbot 7, a compact machine billed by manufacturer Ecovacs Robotics as the first full-service window-washing robot.

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He added that the robot's ability to follow a person made it "an interesting navigation machine which might end up useful in other domain, such as search and rescue".

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