NASA's next trip to the moon will explore its south pole, an area that gets even colder than Mars. So scientists need a robotic arm system that can function in temperatures as low as minus 280 F.

NASA's next trip to the moon will explore its south pole, an area that gets even colder than Mars. So scientists need a robotic arm system that can function in temperatures as low as minus 280 F.

Alternatively, if you want to see how this voice-controlled robot helped return the life of this attenuated aerospace engineer back to normality, watch the video below.

The computer scientist Christoph Salge is trying to circumvent the need for rules that guide robots’ behavior. His strategy: Give them a goal of making us more powerful.

They started with an articulated robot arm that had four degrees of freedom, and rather than give it a pre-formed self-model, they let it build its own using deep learning techniques.

Traditionally, robot arms have been controlled either by joysticks, buttons, or very carefully programmed routines. However, for [Narongporn Laosrisin’s] homebrew build, they decided to go wi… ...

Great, I thought with a shiver. The researchers are studding the robot arm with sensors that integrate tactile perception and hope to also add some kind of suckerlike appendages.

While robots that can engineer their own evolution might one day rise to the occasion to build something fearsome and menacing to humankind, this is not the robot to do it.

Robots are great at doing things they've been shown how to do, but when presented with a novel problem, such as an unfamiliar shape that needs to be gripped, they tend to choke. AI is helping ...