REAL ROBOTS

Future phones

• Future phones will be more than just phones, they will be all of your mobile devices combined into one. They may be transparent, flexible, self-cleaning, and shape-shifting, but one thing is for sure, they will be cool.

Robotic Cheetah

• Let's take a look at some weak flesh-bag-human replacements, that might seem scary-advanced now, but to future generations will be as laughable as the first mobile, a 5in floppy disk, and those damned Furbies are to us now.

• PETMAN, created to test protective clothing for extreme situations, has become so much more. He’s able to walk like a man, run like a man, and even jump like a man. You can push the big fella and he’ll balance himself out to keep on walking. We suspect he’s made for more than clothes testing – perhaps a future race of robot soldiers who don’t like being pushed

about? Yes, that’s much more exciting.

MILITARY ROBOTIC TRUCK

• The goal of the Army and Marine Corps’ Autonomous Mobility Appliqué System (AMAS) program is to take active military vehicles and "roboticize" them to the extent that they can operate fully autonomously in both urban and rural environments. Lockheed took part in a Capabilities Advancement Demonstration (CAD) late last month, and it's

looking pretty good:

Self-parking car

• BMW's next self-parking car won't need any human help

Soft robotic fish • Soft robots — which don’t just have soft exteriors but are also powered by fluid

flowing through flexible channels — have become a sufficiently popular research topic that they now have their own journal, Soft Robotics. In the first issue of that journal, out this month, MIT researchers report the first self-contained autonomous soft robot capable of rapid body motion: a “fish” that can execute an escape maneuver, convulsing its body to change direction in just a fraction of a

second, or almost as quickly as a real fish can.