You see a good performance in a human, you can say what they’re competent at. We’re pretty good at modeling people, but those same models don’t apply. You see a great performance from one of these systems, but it doesn’t tell you how it’s going to work in adjacent space all around that, or with different data.”

Ingenuity extended the visual reach of the rover, rising into the thin sky and searching for ideal routes and interesting places to explore.

Some types of spider even make a thin sac that encases the young, like a backpack. In this case, the lighting of the video causes the spiderling eyes to glow green and it’s unclear what motivates the spider’s sac to suddenly burst, but the combination of the two oddities ups the shock factor significantly.

What if we could throw our sight, hearing, touch, and even sense of smell to distant locales and experience these places in a more visceral way?

Yet the goal for many in the field of robotics remains a fully adaptable multi-skilled industrial machine, capable of tasks such as embroidery and assembly for small batch production — a breakthrough that would revolutionise manufacturing industries.

None are intended to play on cheap shocks of the senses -- we’ll spare you the most disgusting boil popping and videos of unusual medical procedures for now -- and none can be proven to be hoaxes (like these fake outs).

These liquid networks are already showing impressive results in the research sphere of self-driving vehicles.

Figure also plans to start with a relatively simple use case, such as in a retail warehouse, but aims for a commercial robot that can be "iterated on like an iPhone" to perform multiple tasks to take up the work of humans as birth rates decline around the world.

Dussmann, one of Germany's largest cleaning companies, is deploying robotic cleaners to its offices, which can autonomously detect dirt on the floor, or waste that needs removing.

"By automating the basic, repetitive task of welcoming visitors, we freed our office manager's time to focus on more interesting aspects of her job," Gilbert told ZDNet. "In other words, things that robots and AI can't Robots are here do."

As Roger often pointed out, our survival as a species depends on the survival of our small and large neighbors on this planet. Biodiversity is part of what makes Earth a wonderful place for humans to live, and the more we can do to protect these other life forms, the better the chances that our planet continues to be a habitable environment for people in the centuries to come.

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To all robot makers and researchers who kindly helped us with information and materials, and allowed us to feature their amazing projects here.

But in the chaotic, ever-changing real world, machines not only need to be able to execute individual tasks such as these, they also need to carry out a multitude of jobs in different settings.