Robots are finally becoming a part of everyday life.

Some creative homeowners are able to protect their homes with guard robots, which are surprisingly cheap (the basic version of the robot can be bought in stores for $170). The Robots record audio and video and transmit them to a live internet feed. They also have a built in speaker system so that they can warn intruders that the home isn’t worth robbing. The software required to allow the robot to patrol a home is available online, but ambitious programmers can add their own handiwork to the existing code. Some of the robots can even be controlled with a primitive neural interface device (and by primitive I mean some of the best technology in the field that we have today, but we’ve barely scratched the surface in neural interface technology), which can detect changes in brain wave patterns and use that information to relay commands to the guard robots.

With guard robots, teaching robots, and even learning robots (researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are working on teaching a robot to research basic facts and to infer assumptions from these facts), perhaps the future that science fiction fans dream of is not that far off after all.

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