San Francisco-based Figure has developed an AI humanoid robot that can walk, talk and Interact. It learned how to brew a pot of coffee by watching videos.

An empathy module analyzes facial cues, acoustic markers in speech and the content of speech itself to read human emotion and tell the robot how to respond.

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.

I think that the idea of empowerment does fill a niche. It keeps an agent from letting a human die, but once you’ve satisfied this very basic bottom line, it still has a continued drive to create ...

In both the consumer and industrial worlds, scientists are working to make robots more human like. But while there are some common goals—and even similar applications—the vision can be quite ...