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The article discusses how mobile robots are replacing but not taking jobs at delivery services company FedEx Corp.'s shipping hub in Kernersville, North Carolina. Topics discussed include the automation of processes using robots, the creation of about 100 new jobs per year at the facility, and the demand for more people at the hub as most jobs still require human dexterity.

A design firm financed by the Pentagon has broken a 23-year-old speed record for legged robots. Boston Dynamics, founded by Marc Raibert, a former M.I.T. roboticist, released a video on YouTube on Monday of its four-legged Cheetah prototype running on a treadmill at 18 miles per hour. The treadmill is designed to support speeds up to 50 m.p.h., but the company said it planned to test the Cheetah outside the lab as soon as possible. The previous record was 13.1 m.p.h., set at M.I.T. in 1989. Boston Dynamics, based in Waltham, Mass., has designed a range of mobile robots with financing from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Previous designs, like BigDog, have been machines intended to follow walking soldiers in the field with loads of up to 1,000 pounds. The company said that while Cheetah was a research project, both military and civilian applications were possible, including emergency rescue and the navigation of rugged terrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TO get to the front door of the Elias family, the inhabitants of the new Dream Home at Disneyland, you must step onto a revolving walkway and glide past Tom Morrow, a Nathan Lane-voiced robot with a face like a machine-age Arcimboldo and a brush cut of stiff copper-colored wire. Tom's body is an exposed skeleton of hydraulics, wires and transistors, and his one concession to modesty, a clear plastic lab coat, adds an unwittingly pornographic grace note. His signature song, ''There's a Great Big World of Innoventions'' -- audible no matter where in the home you may venture -- will play dozens of times during your stay, and will run through your head with a Manchurian Candidate tenacity long after you leave. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Focuses on the problem of robotic navigation. Details of an invention by University of California, Irvine graduate student Garnet Hertz: a three-wheeled vehicle which is driven by a giant Madagascar hissing cockroach; Comments of Hertz, a Fulbright scholar from Canada, who was inspired by robotics pioneers like Rodney Brooks; Idea that robot intelligence should resemble that of roaches and other insects that react quickly and instinctively to their environment; How the roach is kept in place; Driving styles of the roaches.

Reports that the U.S. military plans to invest tens of billions of dollars in automated armed forces. The Pentagon's prediction that robot soldiers will be a major fighting force in the American military in less than a decade; Features of robot soldiers, which will think, see and react increasingly like humans; How the ultimate ideal of unmanned warfare is combat without casualties, according to Pentagon officials and military contractors; The growing demand for armed bomb-disposal robots in Iraq; Prototypes; Overview of the Pentagon's Future Combat Systems project; Question of how realistic the Army's timetable is for the project, currently in the first stages of development. INSET: Futurre Fighting Force.