And while a robotic smoothie-making arm, as photographed below, is unlikely to figure out time travel, one does wonder, at the very least, if these latest advances in automation are going to bite the same chunk out of service industry jobs that an earlier wave did out of manufacturing. The five automatons profiled below aren’t the only ones in town; you should also mull over the societal implications of the burger-making robot, the salad-making robot, and the pharmaceutical-technician robot…

Marble is an electric autonomous delivery robot that uses cameras and sensors to navigate sidewalks. The company was founded in San Francisco in 2015 by two computer scientists out of Carnegie Mellon University. Here Marble makes its way along a testing route in Concord, with its “Cross at the Green, Not In Between” algorithm on display.
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