Archive 12.06.2023

In the film "Top Gun: Maverick," Maverick, played by Tom Cruise, is charged with training young pilots to complete a seemingly impossible mission—to fly their jets deep into a rocky canyon, staying so low to the ground they cannot be detected by radar, then rapidly climb out of the canyon at an extreme angle, avoiding the rock walls. Spoiler alert: With Maverick's help, these human pilots accomplish their mission.

By combining inspiration from the digital world of polygon meshing and the biological world of swarm behavior, the Mori3 robot can morph from 2D triangles into almost any 3D object. The EPFL research, which has been published in Nature Machine Intelligence, shows the promise of modular robotics for space travel.

How MuZero, AlphaZero, and AlphaDev are optimizing the computing ecosystem that powers our world of devices.

How MuZero, AlphaZero, and AlphaDev are optimizing the computing ecosystem that powers our world of devices.

How MuZero, AlphaZero, and AlphaDev are optimizing the computing ecosystem that powers our world of devices.

How MuZero, AlphaZero, and AlphaDev are optimizing the computing ecosystem that powers our world of devices.

How MuZero, AlphaZero, and AlphaDev are optimizing the computing ecosystem that powers our world of devices.

How MuZero, AlphaZero, and AlphaDev are optimizing the computing ecosystem that powers our world of devices.

How MuZero, AlphaZero, and AlphaDev are optimizing the computing ecosystem that powers our world of devices.

How MuZero, AlphaZero, and AlphaDev are optimizing the computing ecosystem that powers our world of devices.

Modern-day society relies intrinsically on automated systems and artificial intelligence. It is embedded into our daily routines and shows no signs of slowing, in fact use of robotic and automated assistance is ever-increasing.

If you missed the 2023 edition of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in London, here we bring you the video digests that were made each of the main days of the conference. Enjoy!

Tuesday 30th May

Wednesday 31st May

Thursday 1st June

Claire chatted to Sara Bernardini from Royal Holloway University of London all about decision-making, reconfigurable robots, and oceanography.

Sara Bernardini is a Professor of AI at Royal Holloway University of London, the Principal Research Scientist in AI and Data Science at the National Oceanography Centre and a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. Her research in decision-making for autonomous systems lies at the intersection of AI, cognitive robotics, and mathematical optimisation. Most of her work focuses on planning for single-agent and multi-agent systems to enable them to act intelligently in real time despite resource and environmental constraints, noisy or faulty sensors, imperfect abilities and extreme conditions.

A team of material scientists and electronic engineers at MIT, has developed a way to create magnetic soft robots by combining fiber-based fabrication systems with mechanical and magnetic programming methods to provide locomotion under unidirectional magnetic fields. In their paper published in the journal Advanced Materials, the group describes how they overcame problems faced by others attempting to create magnetically controlled soft robots and outline the design of the robots they created.

In recent years, roboticists have created a growing number of autonomous systems based on different structures and designs. Among these are modular robots, which are composed of different elements or "modules" that can be reconfigured to carry out specific tasks more effectively.