Earthquake rescue robots have experienced their final tests in Beijing. Their designers say with these robots, rescuers will be able to buy more time to save lives during an earthquake.

This robot looking like a helicopter, is called the detector-bot. It’s about 4 meters long, and it took about 4 years to develop the model. Its main functions are to collect information from the air, and send goods of up to 30 kilos to people trapped by an earthquake.

This robot has a high definition 360-degree panoramic camera. It can work day and night and will also be able to send the latest pictures from the quake area.

Dr. Qi Juntong said, “The most important feature of this robot is that it doesn’t need a distant control. We just set the destination information on it, and then it takes off, and lands by itself. It flies as high as 3,000 meters, and as fast as 100 kilometers per hour.”

This robot has a different function — it can change as the environment changes. Its main job is to search for any signal of life in places where human rescuers are unable to go.

As well as a detector that finds victims and detects poisonous gas, a camera is placed in the 40-centimeter-long robot, which can work in the dark.

Another use for the rescuers is the supply-bot. With its 10-meter-long pipe, people who are trapped in the ruins will be able to get supplies including oxygen and liquids.

Experts have said that the robots will enter production, and serve as part of the national earthquake rescue team as soon as next years.

Whether in the home or the workplace, social robots are going to become a lot more common in the next few years. Social robots are about to bring technology to the everyday world in a more humanized way, said Cynthia Breazeal, chief scientist at the robot company Jibo.

While household robots today do the normal housework, social robots will be much more like companions than mere tools. For example, these robots will be able to distinguish when someone is happy or sad. This allows them to respond more appropriately to the user.

The Jibo robot, arranged to ship later this year, is designed to be a personalized assistant. You can talk to the robot, ask it questions, and make requests for it to perform different tasks. The robot doesn’ t just deliver general answers to questions; it responds based on what it learns about each individual in the household. It can do things such as reminding an elderly family member to take medicine or taking family photos.

Social robots are not just finding their way into the home. They have potential applications in everything from education to health care and are already finding their way into some of these spaces.

Fellow Robots is one company bringing social robots to the market. The company’ s “ Oshbot” robot is built to assist customers in a store, which can help the customers find items and help guide them to the product’ s location in the store. It can also speak different languages and make recommendations for different items based on what the customer is shopping for.

The more interaction the robot has with humans, the more it learns. But Oshbot, like other social robots, is not intended to replace workers, but to work alongside other employees. “ We have technologies to train social robots to do things not for us, but with us,” said Breazeal.