The majority of the world's robots are bolted to a spot on a factory floor, sentenced to a repetitive choreography of welding, stamping and cutting.
This article, which is well worth reading in and of itself, also got me spending in inordinate amount of time looking into the world of Medieval robots.
These ranged from a world run by robots, where advances in artificial intelligence gradually increase our dependence on technology, to an aging population, where changing demographics alter the needs of the workforce.
According to the International Federation of Robotics there are now 1.1 million working robots in the world.
While other projects are working on standardising the way robots sense the world and encode the information they find, RoboEarth tries to go further.
Nanto City, a centrally located Japanese city with an elderly population that comprises 26% of its total residents, is one of the first municipalities in the world to experiment with using robots to help care for the elderly.
Surgery soon will become a partnership between man and machine--and it must, says Russell Taylor, world-renowned designer of surgical robots.
The Rapyuta database is part of the European Robo Earth project that began in 2011 with the hope of standardising the way robots perceive the human world.
First established in 1997 in Nagoya, Japan, RoboCup pits robots from around the world in contests of skill including their capacity to provide disaster management and assisted living services.
By contrast, RoboEarth hopes to start showing how the information that robots discover about the world can be defined so any other robot can find it and use it.
"It was apparent to us that one day the robots would take over the world, and we decided we wanted to be on the wining side, " Wright wrote in a note posted on Wednesday to Sporum, the official "Spore" forum.
That worry takes on a particularly intense form when the machines come with a human face: Capek's play that gave robots their name depicted a world in which they initially brought lots of benefits but eventually led to mass unemployment and discontent.
Harvesting asteroids, creating a radically transparent virtual world state and replacing workers with intelligent robots are all very well, but unless our big tech companies recognize their social responsibilities, I fear that our real future could be as disturbing as the science fictional one presented in Ridley Scott's blockbuster.
Robots are spreading in the civilian world, too, from the flight deck to the operating theatre (see article).
Drones could tend to gardens and farms while people control telepresence robots on the other side of the world via heads-up displays like Google Glass.
We'll look forward to the friendlier machine assistants that result... and keep in mind the room for deception when the robots invariably plot to take over the world.
ENGADGET: Nexi robot helps Northeastern University track effects of shifty body language (video)
Aside from providing the world with great gadgets, entertainment devices and robots -- the Japanese have now answered the question that every robot enthusiast since Isaac Asimov has been trying to answer: how do we improve robot-humanoid interaction?
ENGADGET: Japanese prof thinks robots need emotional sensibilities
In the medical world, Russell Taylor has contributed to innovations in surgical robots for decades.
Robots confused about what they encounter in the world of humans can now get help online.
Dr Waibel said it would be a place that would teach robots about the objects that fill the human world and their relationships to each other.
And theme parks around the world are spending billions of dollars hoping that the thrill of robots can entice tourists.
If Turkle is right that these two groups are the ones getting the robots, we need to think again about the world we build with them.
Although robots are getting better at adapting to the real world, they still tend to tackle challenges with a fixed set of alternatives that can quickly become impractical as objects (and more advanced robots) complicate the situation.
ENGADGET: MIT algorithms teach robot arms to think outside of the box (video)
As we think about how robots will begin helping us in all different aspects of our lives over the next decade, we believe that design innovation in robotics will be at least as important as tech innovation in finally making robots available to a majority of people in the world.
The Japanese have made surprisingly little use of robots to clear up after the recent earthquake, given their world leadership in this area.
Back to my 1982 essay: predictions about future society populated by personal robots have been around nearly a century, yet much of our world has not changed that dramatically.
FORBES: Reflections on Personal Robots, Backwards and Forwards
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