Here are some of the coolest robots in the world.

Pleo is one of the most good-looking robots on the market. The robot is designed to learn from its experiences, and the environment it is kept in. Pleo has become especially popular among children, as it could be used for both entertainment and educational purposes. It exhibits lively behavior like eating and sleeping. It can now be bought at a price of $469.

BigDog is the most advanced rough land robot on earth. Designed to serve military (军事的) uses, the machine is around 3 feet long, 2.5 feet tall, and weighs 240 pounds. The robot can move on rough land at a speed of four miles per hour, and is able to carry up to 340 pounds of weight.

An Amazing human-like robot, I-Sobot is one of the smallest human-like robots, with a height of just 6.5 inches and a weight of 12 ounces. It costs $300. It has become the most-produced robot in the world. This small robot can walk, play the air guitar, and perform about 200 moves. This robot can be controlled by either a remote control or voice commands.

KeepOn is a small robot which can perform simple and natural interaction. Developed in 2015, KeepOn is an interactive toy designed to help children with autism(自闭症) in their social development, and costs anywhere from $40 to $100.

The time that cars could go completely driverless is coming “very soon”, according to Jianxiong Xiao, CEO and founder of AutoX, a Shenzhen-based start-up developing autonomous driving technology.

Now, most regulations across various cities in China still require the presence of a safety driver in vehicles, but the company foresees that as more data gets captured over time, that requirement would be reduced, Xiao told CNBC's “Street Signs Asia" on Wednesday.

The autonomous driving tech firm chose to partner with Alibaba's AMAP — a Chinese mapping service provider --- to roll out its RoboTaxi ride hailing service in Shanghai on Monday. AMAP is a "super mobility app" with almost 500 million active monthly users, according to Xiao.

AutoX had received support from Shanghai authorities to roll out a fleet of 100 autonomous ride-hailing cars in Shanghai's Jiading district in September last year.

Earlier this month, AutoX announced that it had set up an 80,000 square feet RoboTaxi operations center in Shanghai to help facilitate (使容易)operations of its driverless fleet, as well as act as a center to collect data from daily operations.

Backed by investors such as Alibaba, Shanghai Motor and Dongfeng Motor, AutoX is one of the players in the trillion U.S. dollar Chinese autonomous driving vehicles market alongside others like DiDi Chuxing.

Xiao said they were working with the technology to ensure the vehicles were "very, very safe" and are carrying out a lot of testing.

Over a hundred vehicles have been arranged on roads daily to obtain enough data needed to validate the software and system, according to Xiao.

He added that the company was also running a hundred times more simulations (模拟)in the car every day, and the “huge amount of data" would help to prove that the vehicles could be used in "full safety".

“Our goal is not to just make (it) as safe as human beings, but going one step forward to really make...a superhuman safety standard; (cars) that (can) drive much safer than any human being ever,“ Xiao said.

The appearance of text-to-video artificial intelligence (Al) technology has the potential to completely change advertising, movie trailers and short video industries, as Sora, a new AI model developed by US-based AI research company OpenAI—creator of chatbot ChatCPT—has recently become a global topic, experts said.

They added that the multimodal (多模态) large language model, which can produce high-resolution video clips based on given texts, is an undoubted future development direction for generative AI and will bring strong motivation (动力) into a new round of industrial development.

Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while keeping visual (视觉的) quality, OpenAI said. It can make complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate (准确的) details of the subject and background. The model understands what the user has asked for and how those things exist in the physical world.

Liu Xingliang, director of the Beijing-based Data Center of China Internet, a research institute specializing in the internet industry, said Sora is undoubtedly a major breakthrough for AI. “It shows AI’s advanced ability to understand and create complex visual content and brings about huge opportunities and challenges for content creation, entertainment and film and television production industries. The video-generation model will help video content creators turn their ideas into reality at a faster speed and at a lower cost.” Liu said, adding that AI is expected to play a more important role in all aspects of human lives in the future. He said that with advancements in AI technology, traditional film and TV production processes and related business models will likely be reshaped.

Still, it does not necessarily mean the disappearance of traditional film and industries, and more effort is needed to explore new artistic forms and expression methods by integrating AI technology.

Meanwhile, experts say using text-to-video AI models raises concerns about ethics (道德准则), copyright protection, personal privacy leakage and data security. Ensuring the authenticity and transparency (透明性) of the content has become an important issue, and more effort is needed to make rules and regulations to ensure the healthy development of such technology.