When a meteor is bright and ignites within the atmosphere, the phenomena is called a “bolide.” The Chelyabinsk meteor that flew over Russia in February 2013 was bright enough to be classified a “superbolide.

Similarly, Google's Alphabet X is working on an 'Everyday Robot Project', for robots to whizz around the office sorting through waste, to make sure that items are trashed in the correct recycling bins.

“If we can just get humanoids to do work that humans are not wanting to do because there’s a shortfall of humans, we can sell millions of humanoids, billions maybe.” (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Don't Hug Me. I'm Scared became Internet famous a couple years ago thanks to their retroactively childhood-destroying short film of the same title.

Yet the goal for many in the field of robotics remains a fully adaptable multi-skilled industrial machine, capable of tasks such as embroidery and assembly for small batch production — a breakthrough that would revolutionise manufacturing industries.

"In that area, not that many automation engineers are available," he adds. "The shop owner told me from the start that he was very sceptical that the technology would work at all. He was standing in the background when we showed the proof-of-concept. Just 20 minutes in, he said he'd buy it."

Robots can allow us to extend our perceptual reach into alien environments here on Earth, too. In 2007, European researchers led by J.L. Deneubourg described a novel experiment in which they developed autonomous robots that infiltrated and influenced a community of cockroaches.

These robotic roaches bring me back to my first conversation with Roger Payne all those years ago, and his dreams of swimming alongside his majestic friends. What if we could build a robot that accomplished something similar to his imagined capsule?

Although AI has brought that ambition closer, it has not yet fulfilled it, says Nick Hawes, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at Oxford university.

Traditionally, such vehicles struggle at transition times when conditions change, such as at dawn and dusk. While conventional AI models focus a lot of attention on features at the sides of a road, such as vegetation, to instruct the vehicle to drive between them, liquid neural networks focus more on the middle distance of the highway and potential obstacles.

As any telegraph operator or steam engineer might tell you, progress waits for pelo one. The robots are here, and technological advances are bringing them closer every day to the AI-powered automatons of the silver screen.

DeepMind taught a robot dog to Robot world open doors with its paw rather than bodying through it. Once learnt, it became part of the foundation model and didn’t have to be taught again — not so different from training a real pet.

It’s far from the only way to use drones to extend the range of human eyes. After the whale project, we lent a drone to Cfoiline Cousteau, the documentary film producer and granddaughter of the celebrated marine scientist Jacques Cousteau.

The AI and ML deployments are well underway, but for CXOs the biggest issue will be managing these initiatives, and figuring out where the data science team fits in and what algorithms to buy versus build.