Robots are usually discussed as a threat to jobs in developed countries, but they could have an even more destructive effect on the developing world. A recent article in The Financial Times describes how automation could destroy one of the tried-and-tested routes of economic growth, in which a country’s labor force moves from farms to factories, creating cheap goods for export. We rightly think of factory work as dangerous, monotonous, and exploitative, but that doesn’t meant...

O-Robotix is developing an underwater robot, SeaDrone, which aims to make underwater inspection and aquaculture maintenance easier by incorporating smart technologies into its designs. Among the many startup companies that joined TechCrunch’s Disrupt NY 2016 this week, O-Robotix made themselves pretty well known, despite not winning the contest, thanks to their remarkable product, SeaDrone. Many drone developments in recent years have focused...

It is hard to miss the warnings. In the race to make computers more intelligent than us, humanity will summon a demon, bring forth the end of days, and code itself into oblivion. Instead of silicon assistants we’ll build silicon assassins. The doomsday story of an evil AI has been told a thousand times. But our fate at the hand of clever cloggs robots may in fact be worse - to summon a class of eternally useless human beings.

At the Stanford shopping center in Palo Alto, California, there is a new sheriff in town – and it’s an egg-shaped robot. Outside Tiffany & Co, an unfortunate man holding a baby finds himself in the robot’s path. It bears down on him, a little jerkily, like a giant Roomba. The man dodges but the robot’s software is already trying to avoid him, so they end up on a collision course.

Apple and Samsung supplier Foxconn has reportedly replaced 60,000 factory workers with robots. One factory has "reduced employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000 thanks to the introduction of robots", a government official told the South China Morning Post. Xu Yulian, head of publicity for the Kunshan region, added: "More companies are likely to follow suit." China is investing heavily in a robot workforce.

Google is in talks with the Toyota Research Institute to sell its robotics division Boston Dynamics, a source familiar with the matter told Tech Insider. A price for the deal has not yet been disclosed, but this person says the "ink is nearly dry." Tensions between Google and Boston Dynamics have been brewing since 2014, but a video released by Boston Dynamics in February of its humanoid robot, Atlas, was the tipping point for the separation, according to a Bloomberg article written in March.

Killer robots pose a threat to all of us. In the movies, this threat is usually personified as an evil machine bent on destroying humanity for reasons of its own. In reality, the threat comes from within us. It is the threat of war. In today’s drone warfare, people kill other people from the safety of cubicles far away. Many do see something horrific in this. Even more are horrified by the idea of replacing the operator with artificial intelligence, and dispatching autonomous weapons to hunt and kill without further human involvement.

Experts say it's a troubling development that could help bring the world closer to the nightmare scenario of unthinking robots killing people without the checks and balances of human control.

What can we learn from the quest to build a better tiny, flying robot? A group of Harvard scientists have a vision: to build a robot that can fly, work together in groups, and even pollinate flowers like a honeybee. A group of such robots could be invaluable in search and rescue missions or for forming impromptu communication networks. Meet RoboBee, whose latest feat was published in Science this week. The 80-milligram robot can fly to a surface, perch on it using electrostatic forces...

Most manufacturers are still adjusting to the “positive disruption” brought by the Industrial Internet of Things, but advanced data gathering/management technologies like CMM is improving their opportunities to succeed on that scale.

We already know about Walmart’s plan to use drones for delivering goods to the homes of its online shoppers in super-quick time, but what about the customers who still prefer to visit its physical stores? What can it do to improve their shopping experience? One solution may come in the form of Budgee, a basket-carrying robotic helper that’s designed to follow you around the store as you shop.

SpotMini is a new smaller version of the Spot robot, weighing 55 lbs dripping wet (65 lbs if you include its arm.) SpotMini is all-electric (no hydraulics) and runs for about 90 minutes on a charge, depending on what it is doing. SpotMini is one of the quietest robots we have ever built. It has a variety of sensors, including depth cameras, a solid state gyro (IMU) and proprioception sensors in the limbs. These sensors help with navigation and mobile manipulation. SpotMini performs some tasks autonomously, but often uses a human for high-level guidance.

The robots are coming to four cities this summer. Self-driving robots will soon start delivering food and groceries. This month Starship Technologies is rolling out its six-wheeled delivery robots in London, Dusseldorf, Bern, and Hamburg, Quartz reports. The robots will be used by two food delivery services in those areas, Just Eat and Pronto, as well as courier service Hermes and grocery store Metro Group. Starship hopes that this new technology will help cut both the time and costs associated with delivery.

For what experts are calling the first time in history, US police have used a robot in a show of lethal force. Early Friday morning, Dallas police used a bomb-disposal robot with an explosive device on its manipulator arm to kill a suspect after five police officers were murdered and seven others wounded. “We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was,” Dallas police chief David Brown told reporters.

A robot vacuum cleaner sounds like a great idea. I have a Roomba, one of the most popular models, and most of the time it works great. But sometimes there are unexpected problems. In a recent Facebook post, an Arkansas man described just how bad these problems can be. His dog had an accident on the floor, and then the Roomba started its scheduled cleaning. "If your Roomba runs over dog poop, stop it immediately and do not let it continue the cleaning cycle," the man wrote. Unfortunately, he happened to be asleep when the Roomba ran.

With electronics becoming ever harder to fix because of design and legal restrictions, a loose coalition of repair professionals and environmentalists is putting the screws to manufacturers that they claim are fattening their bottom lines by deliberately engineering disposability into their products. Loosely known as the "right to repair" movement, its advocates say the ability to tinker with products you own is a basic property right and necessary to create a healthy sustainable market.

Robots will be used to suppress attempts by the masses to rise up, a CEO who works with artificial intelligence has warned. Brad Wardell, founder of software company Stardock, said that automation will replace more and more jobs; but the elite few left with all the wealth will be able to crush any attempts to rebel with an array of security machines. “My day job is to evaluate technology and try to predict where it’s going to go next,” Wardell said in a blog post published Monday. “And with that, I am telling you the automation revolution isn’t happening soon. It’s happening right now.”

In the past, the United Nations has considered the threat posed by weaponized AI, but now the body is looking at a more mundane, but still important, robot invasion. A report from the latest UN Conference on Trade and Development has outlined how the increasing use of industrial automation is impacting jobs in developing countries, and what strategies may help in overcoming the problem.

Robots, for all their helpfulness in performing tasks that we would rather not do (usually because those tasks are dangerous or boring), first need to be coded in order to do the work. These specific sets of commands tell the machines what exactly they need to do and define how to do it. While robots can be coded to acquire knowledge for themselves through machine learning, it would take far too long for a single robot to acquire enough experience to actually be helpful with many complex real-world tasks. To address this, several studies have explored...

At a time when robots crowd factory lines, algorithms steer cars and smart screens litter the checkout aisles, automation is the new spectre. The robots, they say, are coming for our jobs. Let them, reply the luxury communists. Located on the futurist left end of the political spectrum, fully automated luxury communism (FALC) aims to embrace automation to its fullest extent. The term may seem oxymoronic, but that’s part of the point: anything labeled luxury communism is going to be hard to ignore.