In the unforgiving polar wilderness, scientists go to great lengths to safeguard the devices that gather precious data.

“We’ve built our robots to be competitive,” Helena said, noting that “each robot has a bumper on the back that you want to protect from the other robots, and they have four lives. The last one ...

In a first for the U.S., Waymo on Wednesday started offering driverless robot-taxi rides on freeways in the Bay Area, along with Los Angeles and Phoenix. The pioneering Google spinoff will also expand ...