There are three major rules that we want our robots to follow: do not harm a human, obey us, and protect us. The prerequisite for these rules? We need to make robots smarter. Ayanna Howard explains how robots can become smarter (hint: it is related to how smart we humans are).

Robots reflect their creators: Us. Counterintuitive and insightful, these robots show us glimmers into what it means to be human.

There's a place in France where the robots do a dance. And that place is TEDxConcorde, where Bruno Maisonnier of Aldebaran Robotics choreographs a troupe of tiny humanoid Nao robots through a surprisingly emotive performance.

What kind of robots does an animator / jazz musician / roboticist make? Playful, reactive, curious ones. Guy Hoffman shows demo film of his family of unusual robots -- including two musical bots that like to jam with humans.

Cynthia Breazeal wonders: Why can we use robots on Mars, but not in our living rooms? The key, she says, is in training robots to interact with people. Now she dreams up and builds robots that teach, learn -- and play. Watch for amazing demo footage of a new interactive game for kids.

Can robots and humans interact the way that human beings interact with each other? Guy Hoffman researches embodied cognition and intelligence in robots.

At his lab at the University of Pennsylvania, Vijay Kumar and his team have created autonomous aerial robots inspired by honeybees. Their latest breakthrough: Precision Farming, in which swarms of robots map, reconstruct and analyze every plant and piece of fruit in an orchard, providing vital information to farmers that can help improve yields ...

At MIT, Cynthia Breazeal and her team are building robots with social intelligence that communicate and learn the same way people do.

The more that robots ingrain themselves into our everyday lives, the more we're forced to examine ourselves as people. At TEDxBerkeley, Ken Goldberg shares four very human lessons that he's learned from working with robots.

Bruno Maisonnier founded Aldebaran Robotics, maker of the tiny, compelling humanoid Nao.

Taking cues from bottom-up biological networks like those of social insects, Radhika Nagpal helped design an unprecedented “swarm” of ant-like robots.

Hod Lipson demonstrates a few of his cool little robots, which have the ability to learn, understand themselves and even self-replicate.

What happens when humans and robots make art together? In this awe-inspiring talk, artist Sougwen Chung shows how she "taught" her artistic style to a machine -- and shares the results of their collaboration after making an unexpected discovery: robots make mistakes, too. "Part of the beauty of human and machine systems is their inherent, shared...

People have been grappling with the question of artificial creativity -- alongside the question of artificial intelligence -- for over 170 years. For instance, could we program machines to create high quality original music? And if we do, is it the machine or the programmer that exhibits creativity? Gil Weinberg investigates this creative conund...

David Hanson's robot faces look and act like yours: They recognize and respond to emotion, and make expressions of their own. Here, an "emotional" live demo of the Einstein robot offers a peek at a future where robots truly mimic humans.

As a child, Huang Yi longed for a robot companion. As an adult, he created a robot to dance with: KUKA.

In this prophetic talk from 2003, roboticist Rodney Brooks talks about how robots are going to work their way into our lives -- starting with toys and moving into household chores ... and beyond.

In his lab at Penn, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams -- for construction, surveying disasters and far more.

We already live among robots: tools and machines like dishwashers and thermostats so integrated into our lives that we'd never think to call them that. What will a future with even more robots look like? Social scientist Leila Takayama shares some unique challenges of designing for human-robot interactions -- and how experimenting with robotic f...

As machines grow ever more intelligent, they're emerging not just as powerful tools, but close companions. These talks -- while offering some whizzy demos -- examine how robots are becoming an intimate part of our lives.

Take a trip down the microworld as roboticists Paul McEuen and Marc Miskin explain how they design and mass-produce microrobots the size of a single cell, powered by atomically thin legs -- and show how these machines could one day be "piloted" to battle crop diseases or study your brain at the level of individual neurons.

Insects and animals have evolved some amazing skills -- but, as Robert Full notes, many animals are actually over-engineered. The trick is to copy only what's necessary. He shows how human engineers can learn from animals' tricks.

Imagine a future home filled with robots in the likeness of dogs, cats and even dinosaurs ...

Paralyzed by a stroke, Henry Evans uses a telepresence robot to take the stage and show how new robotics, tweaked and personalized by a group called Robots for Humanity, help him live his life to the full. He shows off a nimble little quadrotor drone, created by a team led by Chad Jenkins, that gives him the ability to once again stroll a garden...

Everyday, robots perform tasks like picking apples, screwing lids on jars and sewing. But while robots excel at many things, designing them to grasp and handle delicate items has been a challenge. In this tech demo, robotics entrepreneur Carl Vause explains how the octopus tentacle inspired him to develop a machine capable of picking up the most...

Hod Lipson works at the intersection of engineering and biology, studying robots and the way they "behave" and evolve. His work has exciting implications for design and manufacturing -- and serves as a window to understand our own behavior and evolution.

These onstage demos offer a mind-blowing peek at where technology is taking us. Flying robots, levitating superconductors, brainwave-reading headsets and more …

Marc Raibert is the founder and CEO of robot maker Boston Dynamics.

In this powerful talk, P.W. Singer shows how the widespread use of robots in war is changing the realities of combat. He shows us scenarios straight out of science fiction -- that now may not be so fictitious.

Scaremongers play on the idea that robots will simply replace people on the job. In fact, they can become our essential collaborators, freeing us up to spend time on less mundane and mechanical challenges. Rodney Brooks points out how valuable this could be as the number of working-age adults drops and the number of retirees swells. He introduce...