Should workers fear the robots? You don't have to look far to find lots of people shouting "yes." Magazines and newspapers blare headlines like "Welcoming our new robot overlords," "When your new co-worker is a robot," and "You will lose your job to a robot — and sooner than you think." Studies suggest anywhere from 9 percent to 47 percent of American jobs could be automated in the next few decades. In 2017, Bill Gates proposed a "robot tax" to address the problem.

Elon Musk has revealed his Neuralink startup is close to announcing the first brain-machine interface to connect humans and computers. The entrepreneur took to Twitter to tell followers the technology would be “coming soon” – though he failed to provide details. Neuralink was set up in 2016 with the ambitious goal of developing hardware to enhance the human brain, however, little about how this will work has been made public.

Researchers may have found a way to protect Florida strawberries fields from mildew with ultraviolet light. The University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences teamed up with the Norway-based startup, Saga Robotics, to test out the autonomous robot, Thorvald. For several months, one night a week, students test drive the robot and document how the ultraviolet light eliminates mildew from strawberry fields on the Wimauma, Fla. Campus.

The field of robotics is going through a renaissance thanks to advances in machine learning and sensor technology. Each generation of robot is engineered with greater mechanical complexity and smarter operating software than the last. But what if, instead of painstakingly designing and engineering a robot, you could just tear open a packet of primordial soup, toss it in the microwave on high for two minutes, and then grow your own ‘lifelike’ robot?

Millennials face one of the toughest economic landscapes of any generation since World War II: they are working for relatively low pay and, for college graduates, they're saddled with an average of some $30,000 in student debt. But now, they are about to confront yet another challenge — robots. Millennials will be the first generation to absorb the full impact of the new age of automation, which, if history is a teacher, will wipe out jobs faster than the economy can create new ones.

A couple of "Astrobees" are set to join the crew at the International Space Station to help out with chores and special experiments by the end of April 2019. Bees are known as one of Earth's busiest and most hardworking animals, so it's not surprising that NASA is taking inspiration from them for their newest robotic helpers in space.

Conventional six-axis industrial robots typically run a series of cables along the outside of the robotic arm to control power consumption, movement and other dynamic functions. These cables are usually housed in a plastic or rubber tube or tied together using materials as rudimentary as rubber bands or duct tape.

Yoshua Bengio is worried that innovations in artificial intelligence that he helped pioneer could lead to a dark future, if “killer robots” get into the wrong hands. But the soft-spoken, 55-year-old Canadian computer scientist, a recipient of this year’s A.M. Turing Award — considered the Nobel Prize for computing — prefers to see the world though the idealism of “Star Trek” rather than the apocalyptic vision of “The Terminator.”

Boston Dynamics has a new YouTube video showing off its newest robot design. This one is a reimagining of the "Handle" robot that the company originally showed off in 2017. Back then the robot could jump four feet in the air and do all kinds of tricks; now its purpose is to load pallets.

Stop & Shop's parent company, the Dutch food retailer Ahold Delhaize, has started deploying robots named Marty to more than 100 Massachusetts locations. Marty, a six-foot-tall pillar with googly eyes, roams the stores, beeping gently as it scans the floor for trash and spills.

The jellyfish -- a transparent, gelatinous blob that fills the world's oceans -- doesn't inherently seem like much of an inspirational creature. But don't tell the scientists at the National University of Singapore that. They've been inspired by the humble, transparent invertebrates to build their latest creation: a self-healing, stretchable, touch-sensitive electronic skin that could be used to develop soft robots and various human-machine communication interfaces.

For a newborn giraffe or wildebeest, being born can be a perilous introduction to the world—predators lie in wait for an opportunity to make a meal of the herd’s weakest member. This is why many species have evolved ways for their juveniles to find their footing within minutes of birth.

Next time you head to the airport in France there might be a robot waiting to pick up your car. French firm Stanley Robotics has been trialling its self-driving robot valets for a few years, and this week started its first full-time service at France’s Lyon-Saint-Exupéry airport. The system works like this. Customers park their cars in special hangars where the vehicles are scanned to confirm their make and model.

Billionaire Bill Gates and left-wing political wunderkind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might disagree on how much taxes the rich should pay, but they are on the same page when it comes to robots. Tax them, too.

Robots have put half a million people out of work in the United States, and researchers estimate that bots could take 800 million jobs by 2030. But New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says that widespread automation is an exciting proposition–as long as some kind of government safety net is in place to equitably help the people who are displaced.

Which is better for cleaning your toilet: A good, old-fashioned toilet cleaning brush or a $500 robot toilet cleaner? We decided to take the Giddel robot by Altan Robotics for a couple of test runs to see whether the device is actually worth the cost. Here’s how things went.

MIT's scrappy little Mini Cheetah robot is a cutie-pie of a robotic quadruped. The school posted a video on Thursday of Mini Cheetah in action. It's all highlight-reel stuff, showing off the robot's ability to backflip, run, scoot sideways, hop and play in a pile of dry leaves like a shiny little headless puppy.

When gill pratt sat down to discuss the job of running the Toyota Research Institute, the carmaker’s new research division, his Japanese interviewers wrote one word on a piece of paper and asked him to talk about it. The word was dementia. That might seem a strange topic to put to one of the most respected figures in the world of robotics, a man who had previously run a competition to find artificially intelligent, semi-autonomous robots for the Pentagon.

People are prepared to save a robot at the cost of human lives under certain conditions. One of these situations is when we believe the robot can experience pain. This has been indicated in research led by the team of Sari Nijssen of Radboud University, in collaboration with Barbara Müller of Radboud University and Markus Paulus from LMU Munich, which will appear in Social Cognition on 7 February.

"Hi, I would like a robot coffee!," a female participant at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos says as she arrives at the Garden Lounge in the main congress center. It's a coffee space, decorated in white and light-colored wood furnishings, where people gather between sessions at this year's event. Next to the main coffee counter there's a highly visible robot called YuMi. Benoit Gerber, a local product manager at Swiss-Swedish multinational ABB, told CNBC the robot is about four years old, and making an appearance at WEF for the first time.