At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Cynthia Breazeal has been developing non-mobile robots with emotions.

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Mobile robots will be used much more widely than they are now.

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Rovio and iRobot's ConnectR start to hint at the third stage of robotics: small, mobile robots with all the capabilities of a PC.

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Most mobile robots do this using a technique called SLAM (simultaneous localisation and mapping), whereby they build up a map of their unknown environment, using various sensors, whilst keeping track of their current position at the same time.

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The system could be particularly useful for drones, self-driving cars or other mobile robots who have to do a lot of number crunching just to get round, said Mohanarajah Gajamohan, technical head of the project at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

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This weekend at Techonomy 2012, we gather near Tucson to try to make sense of the explosion of data, the empowerment of the planet by mobile devices, how companies and governments must reorganize themselves, the insurgent influence of robots, and the growing global power of a few key American Internet companies.

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