The world is becoming increasingly focused on ecological matters. The global marketplace is all about the better utilization of existing resources. Foremost amongst this is lowering energy consumption.

All of these considerations are having an impact on how industrial robots are employed. Eco-friendly legislation, as well as practicalities, means that industrial robots will require to have the appropriate built-in features. They will need to be built to integrate into any software-organized production line, along with other robots currently working in those environments. More importantly, they will have to be able to react independently – responding autonomously to changes that are made in production orders. They will also be required to co-operate with the work team where aspects of production are being reconfigured.

So the key buzzwords where modern industrial robots are concerned are ‘autonomous intelligence', ‘energy saving' and ‘miniaturization'. Light materials will be all-important, as well as sensor-less controls, and the ability to navigate fluently out-of-doors.

So, over the next decade or so, an industrial robots will be so much more than something that puts vehicles parts in place on a production line. They will become car navigation systems that will assist their driver in steering through foggy regions. Or they might be bulldozers on construction sites, working to a blueprint far more exactly than any of its ‘human co-workers'.

Industrial robots will continue to become more mobile due to enhancements to light manipulation, or haptic interfaces such as touch screens. The possibilities for making industrial robots more versatile are virtually limitless. Think of elderly people being assisted in their homes thanks to 24-hour support from robot assistants or nurses. These machines could monitor their charge's health status, as well as getting in touch with family or medical services in the case of an emergency.

Increasingly, robots are being designed with functionality that is based on replicating life. This is leading to what scientists are referring to as ‘biometric robots'. Emotion-controlled robots are being experimented with, in the hope that robots will become ever more adaptable to their environments. The new generation of industrial robots will be better able to cope with their operational surroundings.

Another area where industrial robots will develop is in ‘microrobotics', or ‘nanobots', These are tiny versions of artificially-intelligent devices for use in medical techniques, such as the clearing of blocked blood vessels, or the repairing of damaged tissue.

Several interesting facts were thrown up by the Global Innovation Index published during 2013 – issues that look likely to continue into this year. The nation that was right the world's most innovative was Switzerland (for the second year running), followed by Sweden. The United Kingdom claimed third place, Netherlands was fourth, while the United States of America rejoined the top five. Asian nations came in at seventh and eighth in the top ten (respectively Hong Kong – China and Sinpapore).

The report highlighted the encouraging fact that despite the economic crisis that has afflicted the major world economies over the past two years, innovation in all its varieties and fields remains alive and well. While those countries occupying the key positions have tended to remain fairly constant presence is in these reports, a further aspect worth noting is the rise of middle or low income countries. This batch includes the likes of India, China, Senegal, and Costa Rica. While they haven't actually broken into the top of the leader board, they are beginning to outpace their peers.

The report also revealed interesting aspects of the local dynamics of innovation. While this is an area that has remained off the scope of previous reports, it has now been demonstrated that original innovation eco-systems have emerged in many local areas. This means that there needs tone a sift away from the well-worn tendency to simply duplicate initiatives that were previously proven.

It can clearly be demonstrated that there are innovation hubs multiplying across the globe, despite the fragile state of the international economy. These hubs factor in local advantages that take into account those circumstances most pertinent to the research being undertaken. According to World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Director-General Francis Gurry: ‘For national level policymakers seeking to support innovation, realizing the full potential of innovation in their own backyard is often a more promising approach than trying to emulate successful innovation models elsewhere'.

In producing this report, the economies of 142 countries were examined right across the globe. 84 indicators were used to establish the league table positions, including the quality of top universities, the use of micro-finance, and the range of venture capital deals being undertaken. These factors were employed to both gauge each highlighted country's capabilities for innovation, and to measure the results for comparison with their peers. This report has now become the benchmark for policy makers and business executives throughout the world, seeking an insight into the current state of innovation .

Voyager 1, NASA's deep space probe, is humankind's most distant object. Last year it achieved the milestone of departing Earth's solar system and entering interstellar space – the unimaginable vacuum between our son and the next nearest stars.

Voyager - a mission to deep space Voyager 1, NASA's deep space probe, is humankind's most distant object. Last year it achieved the milestone of departing Earth's solar system and entering interstellar space – the unimaginable vacuum between our son and the next nearest stars. The fact that Voyager had made it to this uncharted area was not immediately released to the world's press. The project scientist Ed Stone explained: ‘We have been cautious because we're dealing with one of the most important milestones in the history of exploration. Only now do we have the data and the analysis we needed'. One of the scientific aspects the project team required information about concerned plasma. This is ionized gas, and is one of space's slowest moving charged particles. There are examples of plasma all around us – such as whenever you pass a lounge bar in the evening and see a neon glow. According to Stone, plasma is the marker that allows scientists to distinguish whether Voyager 1 is inside the solar bubble, or heliosphere, the zone which is inflated by a plasma that seeps from our sun; or whether it is surrounded by material which emanated from the explosions of giant stars million and millions of years ago. The latter would indicate interstellar space. The Voyager mission has been successful on many levels, but determining whether or not it had crossed into interstellar space was a major coup for the project team, as prior to the discovery they weren't entirely convinced they would be able to accomplish this. Stone outlined the fact that all the major landmarks of scientific discovery have required lengthy periods of time. The theory of tectonic plates – explaining the eternal shifting of the Earth's continents and sea floors- took some 40 years to finalise after first being mooted in the 1910s. Scientists spent a long time ingathering data. Voyager 1 is involved in exploring regions that are infinitely more remote and unfamiliar than the Earth's crust. Interstellar space lies over 17 billion kilometers from the sun. In making sense of the information being sent back to headquarters from these depths, it is unsurprising that time is being taken to absorb the fine points. Exiting the heliosphere and entering the interstellar zone really is turning science fiction into fact. Theories about the nature of the universe that have remained open questions for decades are coming closer to being answered with each new communication received from this vast distance. As well as probing deep space, the Voyager spacecraft have also tracked some of our immediate neighbors: mapping, sampling and photographing Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

One of the scientific aspects the project team required information about concerned plasma. This is ionized gas, and is one of space's slowest moving charged particles. There are examples of plasma all around us – such as whenever you pass a lounge bar in the evening and see a neon glow. According to Stone, plasma is the marker that allows scientists to distinguish whether Voyager 1 is inside the solar bubble, or heliosphere, the zone which is inflated by a plasma that seeps from our sun; or whether it is surrounded by material which emanated from the explosions of giant stars million and millions of years ago. The latter would indicate interstellar space.

The Voyager mission has been successful on many levels, but determining whether or not it had crossed into interstellar space was a major coup for the project team, as prior to the discovery they weren't entirely convinced they would be able to accomplish this.

Stone outlined the fact that all the major landmarks of scientific discovery have required lengthy periods of time. The theory of tectonic plates – explaining the eternal shifting of the Earth's continents and sea floors- took some 40 years to finalise after first being mooted in the 1910s. Scientists spent a long time ingathering data. Voyager 1 is involved in exploring regions that are infinitely more remote and unfamiliar than the Earth's crust. Interstellar space lies over 17 billion kilometers from the sun. In making sense of the information being sent back to headquarters from these depths, it is unsurprising that time is being taken to absorb the fine points. Exiting the heliosphere and entering the interstellar zone really is turning science fiction into fact. Theories about the nature of the universe that have remained open questions for decades are coming closer to being answered with each new communication received from this vast distance.

As well as probing deep space, the Voyager spacecraft have also tracked some of our immediate neighbors: mapping, sampling and photographing Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

The prospect of devices that would enable passengers to be disassembled into atoms, transmitted through space, and then reassembled at the other end, has often been broached in science fiction. Think of all those classic Star Trek episodes, where Captain Kirk, requiring to escape the clutches of sundry anti-social aliens, flips open his mobile device to utter the well-worn phrase: ‘Beam us up, Scotty!' Sadly, the key word in that opening description is ‘fiction'. However, rapidly moving bodies from a planet surface into positions high up in the atmosphere is not necessarily a complete fantasy. Welcome to the concept of the space elevator.

Firstly, what exactly are we talking about when we use the phrase space elevator? This would be a device made up of a tether, anchored on the ground, that would reach 100,000 kilometers up into space. This means of transport would provide safe and inexpensive access to an orbital point, as often as was deemed necessary. The overall concept was recently discussed in a report conducted by the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), and entitled: ‘Space elevators: an assessment of the technological feasibility and the way forward'.

The findings of the report make for interesting reading. In the first place, the experts concluded that, theoretically, a space elevator was viable, on the understanding that the risks could be overcome with the likelihood of technological advances as the century progresses. A degree of international co-operation would also need to be applied, resulting in a robust administrative infrastructure being built alongside the technical blueprint.

The tether that would deliver electronic vehicles up into the atmosphere would need to meet various economic criteria. The actual vehicles themselves – described as climbers in the report – would travel up and down at the speed of high-speed trains. The difficulty of maintaining a degree of tautness in the tether would be accomplished by the very rotation of the Earth.

One positive aspect of this technology is that the concept itself is nothing new. As long ago as 1895 the Russian space scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky suggested building a free-standing tower, reaching from the planet's surface to the height of ‘geostationary orbit', at 35,800 kilometers. His prototype vision has been fine-tuned subsequently, to varying degrees, by writers, engineers and scientific researchers. But the recent study marks a considerable shift it the thinking behind space elevators, from the theoretical to the practical.

According to the President of the IAA, Gopalan Madhavan Nair: ‘no doubt all the space agencies of the world will welcome such a definitive study that investigates new ways of transportation with major changes associated with inexpensive routine access to geostationary earth orbit and beyond'.