Robots

iRobot has fixed a couple of glaring issues with its robot vacuum range – but are the latest Roombas enough to save the company? We spent a couple of months with the affordable, midrange Roomba Plus 505 Combo Robot + AutoWash dock.

Construction robots have been around for a while. The new kid on this block is called Charlotte, and it's billed as being autonomously capable of building a 2,150-sq-ft home in a single day – operating at roughly the speed of 100 bricklayers.

Behold, the rise of the tennis-coaching robots. First there was the PongBot, followed by the Tenniix and the Acemate. Now, there's the possibly even more capable ball-shooting, performance-assessing, AI-packin' Aceii One.

Imagine an oversized claw machine at an arcade, but instead of trying to grab cheap toys, your prize is the assortment of waste that sinks to the bottom of the sea. That's essentially what an autonomous robot has been doing at Marseille recently.

There are folks who get genuine pleasure from tending a colorful garden. But if – like me – you'd rather sit back and let a robot do the work, NexLawn is developing a robo-mower with a retractable arm capable of performing numerous garden tasks.

Boston Dynamics probably has the most show-offy robots on the planet right now, and the company's latest video shows that its robodog, Spot, is no exception. Spoiler alert: he nails a septuple back flip that is wildly impressive.

We've seen robot dogs run up hills with luggage, and help fight fire. Now, researchers in Switzerland are putting these mechanical mutts through their paces on the badminton court, teaching them to play about as well as a seven-year-old human.

Though robodogs are available for consumer purchase, most will be deployed to industry and research and maybe even security or rescue. Unitree's latest intrepid quadruped is tough, durable, fast and agile, and is ready for action.

Chinese robotics firm Unitree has launched the R1 humanoid robot at a shockingly low asking price of US$5,900. It's hard to fathom that you can now get a walking, command-obeying machine that costs less than an enthusiast-grade camera.

It's fun to watch how quickly things are improving in home robotics right now. Sunseeker's new X5 robo-mower isn't perfect, but it does an impressive job with complex, multi-zone lawns thanks to its RTK-GNSS positioning system.

Until now, the robot workforce has had to either be plugged in all of the time, or spend some time cabled to the mains to top up its battery pack. UBTech has launched the Walker S2 humanoid, with dual batteries and the ability to hotswap on its own.

In a move that inches us just a little closer to the singularity, engineers have developed robots that can grow, self-repair, and morph by absorbing parts from other robots. They can also help their brethren do the same.