For 12-year-old Anna Du a love of the ocean and marine animals inspired her to build a device that hunts for microplastics. These tiny plastic particles are barely visible to the naked eye, but they pollute aquatic ecosystems around the world, posing a serious threat to marine life.

Snaking through Western Australia’s Outback, a driverless train has made the first autonomous delivery of iron ore from a Rio Tinto Group pit to a coastal port, as the No. 2 miner looks to reap the benefits from a $940 million plan deploying the world’s biggest robots.

The U.K. engineer plans to cut down on flight time lost by airlines to essential maintenance.

Robotic hands could only do what vast teams of engineers programmed them to do. Now they can learn more complex tasks on their own.

The robot told test subjects it was scared of the dark and pleaded ‘No! Please do not switch me off!’

Experts from scores of countries are meeting to discuss ways to define and deal with “killer robots” — futuristic weapons systems that could conduct war without human intervention. The weeklong gathering that opened Monday is the second of its kind this year at U.N. offices in Geneva to focus on such lethal autonomous weapons systems and explore ways of possibly regulating them, among other issues.

A robot submarine able to hunt and kill the predatory crown-of-thorns starfish devastating the Great Barrier Reef was unveiled by Australian researchers on Friday. Scientists at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) said the robot, named the RangerBot and developed with a grant from Google, would serve as a "robo reef protector" for the vast World Heritage site off Australia's northeastern coast.

Humans’ fascination with robots follows a long tradition of connecting emotionally to inanimate objects.

This year's International Conference for Robotics and Systems was like a clash of the robot dog titans as a video emerged of the Boston Dynamics SpotMini hanging out with the ANYbotics robot, called ANYmal. According to ANYbotics' cofounder Péter Fankhauser, it's no coincidence that the design and technology is converging, but it's too early to fear the rise of the robot dog empire.

Tiny automated machines could soon take care of the entire growing process. Fewer chemicals, more efficient – where’s the downside?

Kate Devlin, computer scientist and sex-tech expert, talks about teledildonics, the possible futures of human relationships and the intersection of AI and sex. Dr Kate Devlin is a computer scientist at Kings College London whose work includes delving into the overlap between sex, intimacy and technology as well as human-computer and human-robot interactions. She has organised two sex-tech hackathons, and has recently written a book about sex robots called Turned On.

Although the mere thought of a swarm of microrobots burrowing into an eyeball is enough to make some people squirm, scientists believe tiny, controllable delivery vehicles could be the future of eye medicine. Now, researchers have developed a tiny, rotini-shaped spiral that could one day be deployed in the thousands for targeted drug delivery.

A heart patient who died after a robot performed complicated surgery said the man would have had a “99 per cent” chance of survival if a human had operated. The doctor leading the surgery on Stephen Pettitt, who died after a "catalogue of errors: was not trained enough to use the robot and had only practised using it on a simulator, an inquest heard. In February 2015, the father-of-three, 69, was the first person in the UK to undergo robotic mitral valve surgery.

CIMON, the floating voice assistant, was supposed to be a friend to astronauts. But in his first interaction in space, he got a little snippy.

A cafe staffed by robot waiters controlled remotely by paralysed people has opened in Tokyo, Japan. A total of 10 people with a variety of conditions that restrict their movement have helped control robots in the Dawn Ver cafe. The robot's controllers earned 1,000 yen (£7) per hour - the standard rate of pay for waiting staff in Japan.

If advanced robotics become ubiquitous in society, we need to know that we can trust them. At the same time, we need to make sure robots trust us mere humans in matters they’re not equipped to handle, researchers argue in a paper published last month in the academic journal ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems. The work — a collaboration of Penn State, MIT, and Georgia Institute of Tech scientists — is an attempt to develop a definition and model of trust that could easily translate into software code. After all, robots can’t get a “gut feeling” to trust someone the way humans do.

Robots that grill meat, slice tomatoes, stir-fry vegetables and stretch pizza dough are making fast food even faster, but can you trust a chef who's never tasted the food it creates? There is a distinct lack of chopping, smoke, sweating or swearing in the kitchen at Creator, a new burger restaurant in San Francisco. Instead, there is faint whirring and, if you really listen, the muffled sound of grinding and distant sizzling. It’s because the chefs here are not human.

Tech billionaire Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, is optimistic that humans will be able to shut down dangerous machines should they start to appear. Speaking last week on an artificial intelligence podcast hosted by MIT research scientist Lex Fridman, Schmidt said that he didn't share the same concerns as people like Elon Musk, MIT professor Max Tegmark, or Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher at Oxford University. "We would unplug Terminator if it showed up," he said. "Were the killer robots to start, we would find a way to stop them."

To pick a single pepper takes about 24 seconds, though the researchers say they purposefully slowed down the robot's movements for safety reasons. Sweeper is also equipped with LED lights so that it can work regardless of the time of day, for about 20 hours/day. Still, the robot is far from perfect, with only 61 percent accuracy in picking ripe fruit.

With oceans growing warmer and more acidic as a result of climate change, the world’s coral reefs are under siege. Recent research shows that the number of coral bleaching events has risen drastically in recent years, and in 2016 and 2017 about half of the coral making up Australia’s Great Barrier Reef died off. But researchers at two Australian universities have developed an underwater robot that could help turn the tide in the ongoing struggle to save at-risk reefs.