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MIT’s online magazine Technology Review has a good short article reviewing the year in robotics, giving the highlights of the latest developments from 2009.

The piece has loads of links so you can read up, and sometimes see, the robots in action and it looks like giving robots ‘social skills’ to interact with humans has been a big area of progress:

The socialization of robots was an important area of research this year. Many researchers believe that giving robots social skills will make them better at assisting people in homes, schools, offices, and hospitals. Andrea Thomaz, a TR35 innovator for 2009, created robots that can learn simple grasping tasks from human instructors who use social cues, such as verbal instructions, gestures, and expressions.

Read More …  http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2010/01/the_year_in_robotics.html