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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."

Four years ago, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, uploaded a video to YouTube. It featured a demonstration they'd done using a powerful new robot called PR2, a dishwasher-size machine with two hefty arms and six camera eyes on its face. In the demo, PR2 stands before a disorderly pile of small towels. Then, slowly but surely, it stretches its arms, picks up a towel, and neatly folds it, even patting it gently to smooth out the wrinkles. The robot repeats the routine until no more towels are left in the heap.

The paper presents the most ambitious DARPA (U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) robot R&D program yet. Called the DARPA Robotics Challenge, or DRC, it aims to accelerate the development of robots that can help humans, not only with nuclear emergencies but also with fires, floods, earthquakes, chemical spills, and other kinds of natural and man-made disasters. DARPA (some call it the mad science division of the Pentagon) organized the DRC as a kind of Olympic decathlon for robots, open to teams from anywhere on the globe. But instead of running, jumping, and throwing things, the robots will score points by performing various tasks in a simulated industrial disaster. Picture hulking machines driving vehicles, using power tools, and breaking through walls. And instead of a gold medal, the winning team will take home a US $2 million cash prize.

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.

Engineers design things and solve problems. No surprise there—that's the textbook definition of an engineer. But there's nothing textbook about the careers these 10 engineers have forged for themselves. They're educators, explorers, and entertainers, as well as builders and problem solvers. Nicole Richard, for example, is using Lego kits to fire up young minds all over the world with the possibilities of technology. Chieko Asakawa is making the Web accessible to the blind. Kevin Hardy is part of a team attempting to send a man to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot in the world's oceans. And Brent Bushnell is creating complicated machines with a simple purpose: to delight and enthrall. Trying to visualize an engrossing career in technology? Problem solved.

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.

The most powerful technologies take a while to mature. But when they do, they can rapidly retire mainstays that are decades old. Given in this paper are the top 11 technologies of the decade which are smartphones, social networking, voice over IP, LED lighting, multicore CPU, cloud computing, drone aircraft, planetary rovers, flexible AC transmission, digital photography and class-D audio.

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?

This paper talks about the robots. The robot is also called QB. QB ia what is known as a telepresence robot. It is the creation of silicon valley start-up Anybots.

The paper presents the seven contenders of nuclear reactor design fo r a desperately needed revival and also discussed how it works, advantage and disadvantages of each.

Steampunk is a burgeoning subculture that draws on the elaborate aesthetics and romantic worldview of 19th?century England to envision how things might have looked had a few key technologies been developed further. It conjures a gaslit cityscape filled with steam-powered robots, mechanical computers, ray-gun-toting aeronauts, and monocled mad scientists.

The paper discusses how an international team of engineers brought wind power to the Galapagos Islands. The san cristobal system is a wind-diesel hybrid. The electricity generated by the wind turbines and by three diesel generators converges at the substation before being transmitted to town.

This paper presents progress in transforming Harvard University as one of the elite in engineering education.

Denton ATD, with facilities in Michigan and Ohio, manufactures some of today's most advanced crash-test dummies. The author relates his experience in visiting the company's facility in Milan, Ohio and discusses the detail of Hybrid III, a crash-test dummy model.

The financial industry has long been known to hire math whizzes as quantitative analysts, or "quants," who concoct pricing models, probe new ways to quantify risk, and mine data. Now, as automated trading systems take over ever more of the substantive work on Wall Street, many firms are seeking quants who not only know the math but the nuts and bolts of IT systems, too. A big-time financial firm is recruiting tech talent by offering prizes to the college kids whose software chooses the best investments.

Imagine that you could make hydrogen atoms do something that quantum mechanics says they can?t: slip into an energy state below the ground state, the collapse releasing 100 times as much energy as you?d get by just burning the hydrogen. If you could harness the heat to produce power, using hydrogen from water as fuel, you?d consume no oil, create no fumes, and solve the problems of energy and global warming forever.

"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.

Here at IEEE Spectrum, staffers routinely put Post-It notes on their doors and cubicles to let colleagues know they're out. But you can't slap a note on your door if you decide to work at home at the last minute-which, as I learned this winter, happens quite often when you have a very pregnant wife about to go into labor any instant. That's why I set out to replace those yellow sheets of self-adhesive stationery with something less, uh, analog-something that would allow me to post the updates electronically. An idea then popped up in my head: Twitter for my door.

Rosie, the robot who kept house for the title family in "The Jetsons," a 1960s animated television show, has at last come alive-sort of. Before you'll see a robot slicing cucumbers in your kitchen, researchers will need to make these mechanical servants smarter. Here's how three teams are tackling this challenge.

On a dark November day, Erlendur Thorsteinsson strolls into the Party at the Top of the World. That's what the crowd of gamers calls this annual gathering at the Laugardalsholl arena in Reykjavik, Iceland. And it is quite a party. Crammed into a room, hordes of players battle it out in a challenge called the Super Ultimate Eve Online Mining Tournament of Awesomeness. Elsewhere, attendees share war stories over pints of beer and wait for the metal band Roxor to take the stage.

Marco Migliari steps into the vast recording studio and shuts a heavy metal door behind him. Silence fills the cavernous space where Peter Gabriel, Van Morrison, Coldplay, and Robert Plant have all taken their turns behind the microphone. "I like this sort of steadiness, the quietness of the studio," Migliari says. "It's kind of waiting for something to happen."

Imagine filling up your car?s tank with cheap ethanol from your very own backyard refinery. All you?d have to do is feed the machine with?sugar. Sweet!

In this issue, Erico Guizzo (EG) interviews Ken Goldberg (KG), IEEE Fellow and engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, about telerobots, androids, and Heidegger.

Researchers have long been working to put the brain in direct communication with machines. Recent demonstrations have seen animals and humans controlling ever more complex devices- advanced robotic arms and even prosthetic limbs that can provide tactile sensations. Here's how a monkey, a rat, and a man were able to move matter with their minds.

Here we are in the future, yet we're still wasting time stuck in traffic and trussed in a pressurized cabin for long hours in flight. For the speed boost that was promised us in so many futuristic movies, look to these three technologies.

Walk into a classroom of environmental engineering students and, odds are, nearly half of them will be women. Now head next door to an electrical engineering class: you?ll likely find eight men for every woman. The failure to recruit and retain more women in electrical and computer engineering?large fields with lots of students?is a major reason the representation of women in U.S. engineering as a whole has remained so low for so long. Last year, only 18.1 percent of all bachelor?s degrees in engineering awarded by U.S. schools went to women. And things are getting worse: that?s the lowest level in more than a decade.

There are now 1 million industrial robots toiling around the world, and Japan is where they?re the thickest on the ground. It has 295 of these electromechanical marvels for every 10 000 manufacturing workers?a robot density almost 10 times the world average and nearly twice that of Singapore (169), South Korea (164), and Germany (163).