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News

• Why SoftBank's Pepper could become the iPhone of robots

  It can't cook or clean or do laundry, but SoftBank's Pepper could become the first breakout humanoid consumer robot and the vanguard of an era of mechanized, cloud-connected assistants.

• iRobot CEO decries the slow advance of robotics

  The CEO of one of the biggest and arguably the best-known robotics companies in the world is disappointed at the progress being made in the industry, which he says is nowhere near where he thought it would be today.

• Dyson's robot vacuum takes aim at Roomba

  Dyson has announced a robot vacuum cleaner it says can out-suck any other.

• A good robot is hard to find -- or build

  In the first two days of the NASA robotics challenge, every team failed.

• Why haven't robots yet changed the world?

  A well-known roboticist acknowledged Wednesday at an MIT symposium that robotics has yet to change the world.

• US Army evaluates self-driving, machine gun-toting robots

  The US Army, looking to use more robots on the battlefield, this week is getting a peek at just how ready robots are to become trusted parts of the military.

• Health care robot brings experts to bedside

  A health care robot developed by iRobot and InTouch Health allows doctors who may be thousands of miles away to interact with patients at their bedsides.

• Cyborg plants render humans even more obsolete

  The cyborg plant is not a new concept. The robot plant replacement is even less new: You can buy one for a price of $4.19 from ThinkGeek, after all. But a team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich isn't interested in solar-powered plastic toys or surgically-altered self-lighting plants that hang on a wall (creepy!) -- they're giving plants the ability to feed, water, and sun themselves, by augmenting them with iRobot technology and wheels.

• What the robots saw: Inside Fukushima nuclear power plant

  A stepladder bent and broken against a rack of electrical equipment, debris covering the ground, on-screen radiation readings in the red zone. These are the first images provided by robots from inside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant after the massive March 11 earthquake and subsequent tsunami led to the world's second-worst nuclear accident.

• Robots enter Fukushima reactor building for first time

  A pair of remote controlled robots entered a reactor building at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Sunday morning for the first time.

• iRobot demos 'shape shifting' next-gen robots

  Meet the next generation of robots that shape-shift, are squish-able, and can troll the world's oceans for months on a single battery charge. iRobot, best known for its Roomba disc-shaped robotic floor sweeper, is going way beyond scooping potato chips from under couches with its latest robot offspring.