Emotion

Japan's latest robot, called Kansei and created by a university research team, can pull up to 36 different facial expressions based on a program which creates word associations from a self-updating online database of 500,000 keywords.

The English keywords then trigger the most appropriate facial expression, which ranges from happiness to sadness, anger and fear.

UK researchers claim to have developed emotive robots that bond like human children.

The 1.68 million pound Feelix Growing Project, a global partnership of robotic experts, psychologists and neuroscientists, aims to produce machines that can engage emotionally with humans.