Editor’s note: This article is adapted from the author’s book War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future (University of California Press, published in paperback April 2024). The blistering late-afternoon wind ripped across Camp Taji, a sprawling U.S. military base just north of Baghdad. In a desolate...

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCEICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPANRoboCup...

“How did you find me?” specialty coffee roaster Dajo Aertssen asked. He’d just handed me a bag of single-origin cascara, the dried flesh of coffee cherries, in his shop, Cafés Muda in Lille, France.“The AI sent us,” I replied.He looked puzzled, so I explained that my companion Dawn and I had asked an app called Perplexity AI to name a “coffee roaster...

What’s a secret to getting more students to participate in an IEEE society? Give them a seat at the table so they have a say in how the organization is run. That’s what the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society has done. Budding engineers serve on the RAS board of directors, have voting privileges, and work within technical committees. “They...

Ever since Return of the Jedi premiered in 1983, people have been imagining the day when they, like the film’s protagonist Luke Skywalker, would get to ride speeder bikes that zip across the landscape while hovering just a few meters above the ground. In the intervening years, there have been numerous claims made by companies that they’ve figured...

Early on a June morning in 2023, my colleagues and I drove down a bumpy dirt road north of Kyiv in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Armed Forces were conducting training exercises nearby, and mortar shells arced through the sky. We arrived at a vast field for a technology demonstration set up by the United Nations. Across the 25-hectare field—that’s about...