Even worse: The horror-doll siblings don't merely roll (they're perched atop modified Segways) into a fire scene, squirt some retardant about willy-nilly, and return to their nooks, never to be seen by human eyes again. They're meant to interact with people, via "a booming voice," and visual recognition technology that "algorithmically computes how to handle discordant or contradictory information." So you can't even kill them with a paradox -- mankind's only surefire weapon against robots!

Bat Bots began as a "casual conversation" between a few unnamed engineering professors, presumably the sort with last names like "Depravicus," "Von Nefarios," or "Musk." They believed an airborne robot with the characteristics of a screeching, rabies-riddled cave rodent "could do a better and safer job getting into disaster sites and scoping out construction zones than bulky drones with spinning rotors." The government's response to these "professors" was somehow not a trip to Super-Prison, but a $1.5 million grant. And so we wound up with this new nightmare:

These things would be great at swooping into disaster sites -- just huge swarms of semi-transparent robo-bat skeletons, screeching and dive-bombing the wounded to provide ... comfort? It's unclear how, exactly, a Bat Bot would be preferable to a non-Halloween-themed drone in these scenarios. But don't worry, this will all make more sense when they unveil the next version, which spends its downtime dangling upside down. Because that was the part that disconcerted us: It's not hanging upside down. Not lurking above our heads, in the shadows of dark ledges. We hated that part. Thanks for fixing it.

Ramezani/Chung/Hutchinson/Caltech

SpotMini looks like an artificial intelligence determined the cutest part of a dog to be its skeleton. But if you can get past the initial shock of seeing the Terminator's dog prancing around your living room, using its alloyed Skeksis face to poke into every facet of your home life, some might say it was cute.

Those people are all deranged psychopaths, and the rest of us need protection from them.

Luckily, this mecha-snake is capable of "light intervention jobs" and "disruptive solutions," which both sound an awful lot like an intelligence agency dancing around the subject of cold-blooded murder.

Kongsberg Gruppen

There's also mechanized sea serpent activity underway in Japan (obviously). ACM-R5H is the thing's Star Wars assassin droid-sounding moniker ...

They don't even have an application for it. They made this thing and they don't know why.

And there's no explicit mention of toxic projectiles or explosive metallic fangs in the design docs. The inventors only boast of it being "versatile," and capable of operating in "extreme environments." Side note: Your blood is probably considered a pretty extreme environment.

HiBot

E. Reid Ross is the author of Nature Is The Worst: 500 Reasons You'll Never Want To Go Outside Again, which is in stores now, available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

For more robot overlords we can look forward to, check out The 5 Most Terrifying Robot Advances In Recent History and 6 Shocking Ways Robots Are Already Becoming Human.

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