Artificial intelligence and automation are the new farmhands as growers try to boost productivity amid soaring global demand for food, biofuels and other agricultural products. Why it matters: Farmers one day will be able to manage their fields from their kitchen table, using a smartphone or tablet to drive machinery, inspect plants and irrigate or treat crops with fertilizer or insecticides.

A team of researchers working at Seoul National University has developed a soft robot chameleon that can change its colors in real time to match its background. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes their multi-layer skin design and possible uses for it.

If there’s a memory about my childhood that sticks out more than others, it has to be the summers filled with doing lawn work for my parents. Since I was a perfectionist, I made sure to do everything right — from using a weed wacker to get those perfect edges, to emptying the cut grass into bags for collection. Well, I haven’t needed to do any sort of lawn work in my adult life primarily because I’ve lived in apartments. But it hasn’t stopped me from wondering about how this chore could be automated.

The histories of the military and technology often go hand in hand. Soldiers and military thinkers throughout the past have continually come up with new ways to fill the people over there full of holes as a means to encourage them to stop trying to do the same to their opponents. After the introduction of a new weapon or the improvement of an existing one, strategists spend their time trying to come up with the best way to deploy their forces to take advantage of the tools and/or to blunt their effectiveness by devising countermeasures.

Spot the friendly robot dog has a new owner. Well, the company that makes this computer-controlled pooch does. On Monday, SoftBank announced Hyundai Motor Group officially took a controlling stake in Boston Dynamics, which tinkers with robots like Spot. Hyundai and SoftBank first revealed the deal last year, but as of today, Hyundai now owns a controlling stake -- at least 80% of the firm.

It felt good to love again, in that big empty house. Virginia Kellner got the cat last November, around her ninety-second birthday, and now it’s always nearby. It keeps her company as she moves, bent over her walker, from the couch to the bathroom and back again. The walker has a pair of orange scissors hanging from the handlebar, for opening mail. Virginia likes the pet’s green eyes. She likes that it’s there in the morning, when she wakes up.

"Human obsolescence... is it a good thing?" How's that for a premise for a comic book? Not All Robots is the next creator-owned project from writer Mark Russell. Together with superstar artist Mike Deodato Jr., he's created a pitch-black parable about a dystopian vision of future Earth in which an AI-driven robot workforce has made the human race largely unnecessary. The five-issue limited series from AWA Studios debuts on Aug. 4.

City residents and elected officials pushed back after videos showed the Boston Dynamics robot in action.

COVID-19 has brought about numerous, devastating changes to people’s lives globally. With the number of cases rising across Canada and globally, we are also witnessing the development and use of robots to perform jobs in some workplaces that are deemed unsafe for humans.

Humans have worked alongside animals for centuries. So why are we so obsessed with comparing robots to ourselves? In the early 2000s, a Russian man named Boris Zhurid struck a deal to sell the Iranians a large collection of weaponry. He chartered a transport aircraft to make the delivery from Sevastopol, the largest city on the Crimean Peninsula, in the Black Sea, to the Persian Gulf.

Recently, in a Berkeley lab, a robot called Cassie taught itself to walk, a little like a toddler might. Through trial and error, it learned to move in a simulated world. Then its handlers sent it strolling through a minefield of real-world tests to see how it’d fare.

Nanjing, China-based tech firm Weilan developed AlphaDog, a robodog that uses sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) to carry out a whole host of applications including delivering parcels and guiding the visually impaired.

Industrial robotization in the workforce is projected to worsen the gender pay gap, according to new research using data from across Europe, signaling that any progress toward closing the gap may be quickly eroded without intervention.

Major brands are increasingly turning to the world of high-tech disinfection to strengthen their protocols.

This choreographed dance number is no mere bot scootin' boogie.

Plenty's vertical farm in San Fransisco uses 99% less land, 95% less water, recycled plastic packaging, and is powered by renewable energy.

Pennsylvania has legalized autonomous delivery robots that roam sidewalks to deliver goods same-day from business-to-business or from point of sale to the buyer. The use of delivery robots which can weigh up 550 pounds, was legalized after the bill was approved 105-97 last month, making Pennsylvania the twelfth U.S state permitted to use autonomous devices for deliveries.

A US project has found that AI-controlled military robots perform worse when humans interrupt them – but letting the robots operate alone raises serious ethical questions.

Driverless robot buggies started delivering hot restaurant meals to paying customers in one central Moscow district on Wednesday, their operator, Russian Internet giant Yandex, said.

According to some futurists, in the next 10 or so years, your blood could be streaming with tiny nanorobots to help keep you from getting sick or even transmit your thoughts to a wireless cloud. They will travel inside of you, on a molecular level, protecting your biological system and ensuring that you'll have a good and long life. The future is closer than you may think.