Android

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.

Daniel Harris February 15, 2007

Researchers are developing robots that will assist the elderly and disabled, but the vote is split on how human-like they should become.