The British Army is carrying out a major, four-week test of 70 new technologies, “including unmanned vehicles and surveillance drones,” as part of its “Autonomous Warrior experiment,” the MIT Technology Review reported this week.

Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's regular round-up of the latest and greatest toys. This week, we officially get on the objective for Lego’s Overwatch line, Hot Toys unleashes the galaxy’s most kitted-out Astromech droid, and the new Bumblebee movie gets a very cool figure. Check it out!

The dirty secret about robot vacuums is that they can’t actually clean your entire house. They’re great for floors, but are completely useless for cleaning all of your other other dust-covered surfaces. It’s a problem the Coral One—a robovac with a removable handheld cleaner—was engineered to solve. Its design is…

I know I’m not going to have a robot zipping around my home, working through random chores, anytime soon. But is a simple autonomous companion so much to ask for? Anki’s new Vector bot wants to be your robotic sidekick, but as it looks up at me with confused eyes as I repeatedly try to ask it about the weather, I once…

If you’re receiving this message, please be advised that Site Gamma-Iota-Zeta has been compromised. Repeat, Site Gamma-Iota-Zeta has been compromised. This is not a drill. Containment failures detected for the following Class V entities: Magic Leap. A toilet paper roll with a Fitbit on it. BDSM-Bot. The witches from …

I’ve never been able to quite figure out why I hate snakes, but my disdain of slithering serpents extends to the robot variety as well. I’m sure part of it comes from the way they wriggle and writhe to get around; it just freaks me out. But at the same time, I’m also impressed that robotics researchers have taught robo…

The sex robot community—the people who make the sex robots, and the people who want to have sex with the sex robots—suffered a blow this past week, when the Houston City Council voted to preemptively ban what would’ve been the first sex robot “brothel” in the U.S. But even those council members must know that their…

Rubik’s Cube-solving robots are far from a new idea. In fact, while the human record holder can solve a cube in just 4.22 seconds, the fastest cube-solving robot does it in a little over half a second. This robot isn’t quite as fast, but it’s ability to quickly solve a Rubik’s Cube using just one three-fingered hand…

It’s been a few years since Japan’s AIST updated its HRP humanoid robot line. While the last iteration, HRP-4C, strived to make the robot seem as human as possible with a realistic female head, the new industrial-looking HRP-5P looks like it escaped the factory before its bodywork was finished. It’s not pretty, but…

It’s not going to set any world records, but this robotic Rubik’s Cube that’s filled with electronics and tiny electric motors is actually more impressive than watching someone race through the puzzle in a few seconds because it can solve itself without any assistance—aside from a human messing it up in the first place…

In Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (aka Star Wars), C-3PO lays this self-deprecating confession on Luke Skywalker: “I’m not so good at telling stories.” Yet, two films later, he’s literally telling the story of Star Wars to a bunch of Ewoks. C-3PO might seem like a bumbling idiot, but in this video we show why he’s…

Even after spending $950 on the new self-emptying Roomba, there will still be lots of places in your home that require another vacuum to clean them. It’s a problem common to all robot vacuums—except the new Coral One. Built into this robovac is a removable hand vac that can be used to clean anywhere in your home the…

Originally sold as the world’s first remote control ball, Sphero’s baseball-sized rolling toy has evolved over the years to eventually become one of the most accessible ways to learn the basics of coding robots. Bolt, the company’s latest creation, adds new abilities and ways to automate the bot’s behavior, including…

With the first Jurassic Park, we were all content to just stare in awe at what appeared to be living, breathing dinosaurs onscreen. But four sequels later, we now want to do more than just look at dinosaurs, we want to play with them too. Science has yet to deliver the goods, so Mattel has stepped up to bring…

When Aibo is standing on its hind legs, tail wagging and soft OLED-lit eyes roving, it’s so dang adorable you forget it’s supposed to do stuff. But after a while the initial charm of its design wears off, and you’re stuck asking what the heck this robot dog even does.