The robot army that saves the world won’t be anything like what you imagine. Nope, they aren’t little humanoids who can do synchronised martial arts like the ones who dazzled audiences during . And they won’t help you find a can of Coke with embarrassing slowness like from Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. Instead, they will be microscopic, and mostly made of algae, bacteria and other single-celled organisms. Engineers call them biohybrid microrobots.

If you’ve read about people swallowing pills full of tiny robots to deliver medicine – or you watched the classic 80s flick Innerspace – you’ve already experienced the dream of a microrobot future. For many years, medical researchers have imagined using little machines to get medicine into the hard-to-reach parts of our bodies such as the minuscule capillaries in our lungs. Even better, these machines could actually drive around in our organs, perhaps to seek and destroy cancer cells one by one. The problem is that we can’t actually build motorised devices small enough to do it.

That’s where biomedical engineer Joseph Wang’s work comes in. Like many in the growing field of microrobotics, Wang has dramatically expanded the definition of what most of us think of as “robots”. Any mechanism that can be controlled and move around semi-autonomously is a robot, much like the squishy, pneumatically powered turtle bot I described in a previous column. And some robots contain living tissues – or entire living creatures.

There are many things technology simply can’t do as well as biology – and one of them is motor around inside minuscule environments. Tiny synthetic engines tend to dissolve after a few minutes, Wang says, but “algae just swims and swims”. That’s why he and his colleagues power their robots with the green microalga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.

At the University of California, San Diego, Wang’s lab worked closely with chemical engineer Liangfang Zhang’s research group to create . They began with C. reinhardtii, which can swim with its powerful flagellum, or tail. It also happens to love blue light, so it is relatively simple to guide this single-celled critter by shining a blue light on its target region. Wang and Zhang can even get massive swarms of the algae into formation: by shining the blue light through a screen with a shape cut out of it, they herded thousands of algae cells into forming a circle, square and even more complex designs.

To disperse the swarm, the researchers used a red light. In a video demonstration, they show a swarm under the microscope moulding itself into the shape of the African continent and then scattering again. Essentially, Wang and Zhang created a microrobot army, “programmed” to move in particular ways by blue and red lights.

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To turn this swarm into a microscopic medical team, they expose the algae to nanoparticles that stick to their outer membranes via electrostatic force. The result is half-algae, half-synthetic, all bot. Researchers can guide the fully loaded microbot swarm towards a wound using blue light. One day, doctors might use the masking technique to create custom-shaped algae bandages with many kinds of therapeutic payloads.

Other parts of the body call for a different kind of algae motor. For stomach exploration, Wang says, he and his team had to use where it had become used to acidic environments. That’s right – toxic mining sites produced algae that might one day swim to the rescue with drugs to treat your stomach cancer.

Light is just one way to program the bots. 快猫短视频s can also – organisms that navigate via Earth’s magnetic field – then guide them around inside an animal’s body using electromagnets. Regardless of whether the payload rides on algae or bacteria, it’s referred to as “active” medicine. Traditional drugs are called “passive” because they can’t be programmed to target specific regions or cell types. The hope with much of this research is that more medicine can become active, leading to more effective therapies, fewer side effects and less invasive treatments.

Medicine isn’t the only possible application for biohybrid microrobot swarms, either. Wang’s lab is also in rivers and oceans. Instead of loading the bots up with medicine, researchers cover them in chemicals that can neutralise or absorb toxins. The algae wriggle around in the water, often for days, collecting toxins opportunistically until everything is cleaned up. Meanwhile, some research groups are testing fully synthetic in the ocean.

The fantasy of a robot army doesn’t have to mean humanoid soldiers conquering enemies. Another future is always possible. Tiny algae-cyborg swarms could one day live inside your body – briefly – or travel in packs through the environment, decontaminating the messes that humanity made.

Ace, an autonomous robot powered by AI, cutting-edge sensors and an extremely dexterous arm with eight joints, has played competition-rule table tennis and beaten elite human competitors. The robot is the first machine to excel at the sport.

It was the cerebral game of chess that was first disrupted by computers, but Ace’s success suggests physical sports may be about to have their “Deep Blue” moment – the day, in 1997, that a machine of that name beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov.

“Games have long served as benchmarks for AI, including chess for Deep Blue, but also other games in more recent breakthroughs, like [the Go-playing AI] AlphaGo,” says at Sony AI, Zurich Switzerland, who led the team that built Ace.

But he says those earlier AI milestones were played out online. Ace represents an important advance because it has taken on real-world, professional table tennis champions and held its own.

“Ace offers something that has simply never been captured before: a robot and a human in genuine athletic competition,” says Dürr.

Ace boasts three main advancements in autonomous robotics, he says. Firstly, it uses “event-based sensors”, which means that the robot focuses on certain regions of the images its cameras capture – those indicating changes in motion or brightness, which are critical to tracking the path of the table tennis ball.

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Next, the robot’s table tennis skills are built using “model-free reinforcement learning”, which means, says Dürr, the robot “learns through experience in simulation rather than adopting a model of how table tennis should be played”. This process was similar to having the robot play a table tennis computer game, and the robot notched up several thousand hours of training during the process.

And finally, the team has deployed high-speed robot hardware that allows Ace to play with “human-like agility”, says Dürr. In some ways, it is even more agile than a human, because athletes require around 230 milliseconds to react, he says, whereas the total latency of Ace is only around 20 milliseconds.

Currently, the robot looks like a robot from a factory floor, and relies on a network of cameras and sensors surrounding the table tennis arena. But as the technology advances, the researchers expect Ace will eventually be embodied in a humanoid form.

For the matches played as part of a study published today, Japanese professional table tennis league rules applied as Ace competed against five elite but non-professional players, each of whom had competed for at least a decade and trained 20 hours per week. The robot also took on two professionals.

Ace lost only two of its five matches against elite players, but both of its matches against professional players. It did, however, achieve a win in one game within one of the professional matches.

Another advantage that Ace has over humans is that it does not give away any tells of its next move. On the other hand, it lacks the capacity to read any signs of the body language of humans.

“Some of the athletes involved in our experiments commented that they are usually watching their opponent’s face – which Ace does not have,” says Dürr.

Others were surprised by Ace’s ability to read the spin of their serves, despite their attempts to hide it with different motions. The robot also confounded its inventors – especially when it was able to hit balls that bounced off the net, which was not a skill it had trained for. This was a skill that just “emerged”, says Dürr.

Over the past year, since the study was completed, the team has continued to improve Ace’s abilities.

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In December 2025, Ace beat a professional player for the first time, and in March 2026, Ace won matches against three more professional players: a female professional, , who is ranked in the top 25 in the World Table Tennis ranking, as well as two male professionals, and .

“With further improvements, it should be possible to outperform even the world champion,” says Dürr.

And improvements go both ways, he says.

“Former Olympian noted that before watching Ace, he thought a certain shot was impossible, but having seen it, he believes human athletes could replicate this technique.”

In Luminous, the robots are all abused and your heart goes out to them, but they are, in some cases, dangerous

The grinding, attritional war between Russia and Ukraine is now entirely dominated by drones.? As a result, in the four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine has created from nothing an entire industry and ecosystem capable of designing, manufacturing and operating a variety of ingenious drones.?快猫短视频?was granted access to the pilot schools, labs and factories that are the engine room of this new industry – one that Kyiv hopes to make beneficial and profitable, selling expertise and devices to Western states, once the war is over.