This is the first in a series of posts about robots, past and present.

Since at least the 1950s, people have claimed that we are just around the corner from a robot revolution. Perhaps it’s finally here! The robots are coming!

Recently there have been substantial advances in many different overlapping domains: the driverless car, unmanned drones, machine vision, machine translation, machine learning, speech recognition, facial recognition, swarm robotics, self-reconfiguring modular robots, powered exoskeletons, nanotechnology, etc.

First up: here’s the rather terrifying DARPA AlphaDog Legged Squad Support System (LS3).

The DARPA website says it can track a specific individual, so watch your back!