"Due to the limitations on the current robotic technologies, robots cannot completely supplant human teachers in the educational field, " said Choi.

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Philosophers at the Humboldt University of Berlin, meanwhile, are exploring the various ways in which robotic technologies challenge the notion of what it means to be human.

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With additional support from robotic surgery, new technologies offer the prospects of designing new health care systems that address the needs of the elderly while lowering costs.

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Robotics: Six presenting firms offer robotic and software systems to maximize yield and productivity including Energid Technologies that has developed a robotic citrus harvesting system that automatically finds and removes fruit at a lower cost than manual harvesting, and Vision Robotics that will use stereo vision-based robots to pick, prune and other tasks on specialty crops.

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And in the next few years we're likely to see a number of robotic spacecraft demonstrate the rendezvous and capture technologies that would be needed in these selective culls.

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