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WITH THEIR JAW-DROPPING agility and animal-like reflexes, Boston Dynamics' bioinspired robots have always seemed to have no equal. But that preeminence hasn't stopped the company from pushing its technology to new heights, sometimes literally. Its latest crop of legged machines can trudge up and down hills, clamber over obstacles, and even leap into the air like a gymnast. There's no denying their appeal: Every time Boston Dynamics uploads a new video to YouTube, it quickly racks up millions of views. These are probably the first robots you could call Internet stars.

Sometime later this year, dozens of robots will spring into action at a new factory in Little Rock, Ark. The plant will not make cars or electronics, nor anything else that robots are already producing these days. Instead it will make T-shirts-lots of T-shirts. When fully operational, these sewing robots will churn them out at a dizzying rate of one every 22 seconds. For decades, the automation of the sewing of garments has vexed roboticists. Conventional robots excel at manipulating rigid objects but are rather inept at handling soft,flexible materials like fabric. Early attempts to automate sewing included treating pieces of cloth with starch to temporarily make them stiff, allowing a robot to manipulate them as if they were steel sheets. This and other approaches, however, never became commercially viable, mainly because the clothing industry has resisted automation by relying on cheap labor in developing countries.

While robots are becoming more diverse and capable, there's one component that hasn't changed much in the past half century: their actuators.

At first glance, the crops don't look any different from other crops blanketing the Salinas Valley, in California, which is often called "America's salad bowl." All you see are rows and rows of lettuce, broccoli, and cauliflower stretching to the horizon. But then the big orange robots roll through.

CZECH WRITER KAREL CAPEK'S 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which famously introduced the word robot to the world, begins with synthetic humans—the robots from the title—toiling in factories to produce low-cost goods. It ends with those same robots killing off the human race. Thus was born an enduring plot line in science fiction: robots spiraling out of control and turning into unstoppable killing machines. Twentieth-century literature and film would go on to bring us many more examples of robots wreaking havoc on the world, with Hollywood notably turning the theme into blockbuster franchises like The Matrix, Transformers, and The Terminator.

Most of the world’ s robot s are about as charismatic as a coffeemaker. Not so Cynthia Breazeal’s creations. There’s Huggable, a robot teddy bear, and Kismet, a babbler with big eyes, red lips, and pointy ears. Nexi is baby-faced and blue-eyed, and Leonardo has been described variously as a squirrel, a furry alien, and a giant Furby.

Ten years ago, a now-defunct Silicon Valley startup caused a sensation when it introduced the Personal Robot 2, or PR2. Researchers, in particular, loved the PR2 because it was versatile and easier to program than other robots. It allowed them to focus on their research rather than building a new system from scratch. The PR2 helped advance robotic sensing, navigation, and manipulation, but it wasn't perfect. It was big, heavy, and expensive: Each cost US $400,000.

For years, robotics company Boston Dynamics has been fielding questions about when its Spot robot, famous for its stunts on YouTube, was going to go on sale and how much it would cost. We finally have the answers: Boston Dynamics, in Waltham, Mass., has begun taking orders for Spot on its website, and the basic model is going for US $74,500.

The robot seems determined to put a bigger smile on the man's face. "Are you smiling from the bottom of your heart?" it asks. The man chuckles. "That's what I'm talking about," the robot quips in a high-pitched voice. Then, just for good measure, it bows its plastic head and apologizes for being "too bossy to our CEO."

In February of 2011, N A S A launched Robonaut 2 to the International Space Station (ISS). It was a huge achievement for the robotics team at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC), in Texas. There had been other robots in space, but Robonaut was the first advanced humanoid ever to go on a long-term mission to orbit. On board the space station, the robot was intended to work alongside astronauts, helping with maintenance tasks and scientific experiments. For a while, things went well. Robonaut was powered up for the first time that August, and by 2012 astronauts were using it in research tasks for several hours at a time. Then, two years later, NASA decided to perform a complex and risky upgrade. At the time, Robonaut was just a torso with a pair of arms and a head, and NASA wanted to add legs to help it move around the space station.

In what must be the biggest public display of robot adoration and empathy ever witnessed, thousands cheered as the team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) won the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) in Pomona, Calif., on 6 June. Its robot, an adaptable humanoid called DRC-Hubo, beat out 22 other bots from six countries in a two-day competition organized with the aim of advancing the field of disaster robotics. The team from KAIST, which is in Daejeon, South Korea, walked away from the competition with the US $2 million grand prize.

As the folks behind IEEE Spectrum's robotics blog, Automaton, we were thrilled when Robotis sent us a review unit of its TurtleBot3. This little robot is designed to provide a platform for people looking to get their feet wet with the Robot Operating System, or ROS. ROS is popular with academic researchers and industrial developers, but its complexity can be daunting. . The TurtleBot3's predecessor, the netbook-based TurtleBot2, is still a totally decent ROS platform. But the TurtleBot3 takes advantage of a new generation of low-cost computing and sensing hardware: The platform stuffs a full ROS installation into the absolute smallest and cheapest mobile robot that can support it, while maintaining capability and convenience. . Robotis actually sent us two units, as the TurtleBot3 comes in two flavors, dubbed the Burger and the Waffle. The Waffle offers more advanced features, but it's built around Intel's Joule compute module, which now looks to be on Intel's chopping block. So here we'll be focusing on the US $549 Burger, which is built around the Raspberry Pi 3. . As noted above, ROS presents a tough learning curve. This is not the robot to buy if you just want some fun; this is the robot you buy if you are willing to put in the time and effort to learn ROS alongside advanced robotics and computer science concepts.

Sami Haddadin once attached a knife to a robot manipulator and programmed it to impale his arm. No, it wasn’t a daredevil stunt. He was demonstrating how a new force-sensing control scheme he designed was able to detect the contact and instantly stop the robot, as it did.

Do you like robots? Of course you do! You're reading IEEE Spectrum, so you almost certainly love robots. Robots capture our imagination. Robots are the future. Now let us ask you this: What's your favorite robot?

"Everything is a mess," Rodney Brooks says, as we make our way through a brick-walled room filled with robots in various states of assembly here at Rethink Robotics’ headquarters in Boston. The mess, we should point out, makes Brooks, the company’s founder and CTO, very happy. It means things are busy. The past few weeks, he says, have been particularly hectic. That's because today Rethink is making its collaborative factory robot Sawyer available for purchase.