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A crewless robotic boat retracing the 1620 sea voyage of the Mayflower is set to land near Plymouth Rock.

Scientists are working on diagnostic techniques that could sniff out chemical compounds from breath, sweat, tears and other bodily emissions and that act as fingerprints of thousands of diseases.

Mobile robots are now being introduced into a wide variety of real-world settings, including public spaces, home environments, health care facilities and offices. Many of these robots are specifically designed to interact and collaborate with humans, helping them to complete hands-on physical tasks.

In a step toward robots that can learn on the fly like humans do, a new approach expands training data sets for robots that work with soft objects like ropes and fabrics, or in cluttered environments.

Self-driving big rigs will be soon hauling Wayfair furniture down Interstate 45 through a new partnership of Waymo and J.B. Hunt Transport Services.

For humans, finding a lost wallet buried under a pile of items is pretty straightforward—we simply remove things from the pile until we find the wallet. But for a robot, this task involves complex reasoning about the pile and objects in it, which presents a steep challenge.

The space station is a bridgehead for human space exploration missions. During its construction, operation, and maintenance, there are a variety of tasks that need to be performed. However, the space environment has harsh conditions such as microgravity, high vacuum, strong radiation, and large temperature differences, which seriously threaten the health and life safety of astronauts.

A team of researchers at the University of Zurich, has developed a highly agile quadrotor drone that is able to avoid obstacles and carry out trajectory tracking. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes how they designed their drone, what they put into it and how well it worked when tested.

Humans have long been known to sympathize with the machines or computer representations they operate. Whether driving a car or directing a video game avatar, people are more likely to identify with something that they feel in control of. However, how the autonomous behavior of the robots affects their operators is not known. Now, researchers from Japan have found that when a person controls only a part of the body of a semi-autonomous robot, they are influenced by the robot's expressed "attitudes."

Research teams at the University of Tokyo, Keio University and Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan have developed a virtual robotic limb system which can be operated by users' feet in a virtual environment as extra, or supernumerary, limbs. After training, users reported feeling like the virtual robotic arms had become part of their own body. Published in Scientific Reports, this study focused on the perceptual changes of the participants, understanding of which can contribute to designing real physical robotic supernumerary limb systems that people can use naturally and freely just like our own bodies.

Magnetic technology mounted on drones can identify mines and unexploded munitions on land and at sea much more effectively than conventional mine clearance using handheld detectors. The DTU spinout company Umag Solutions has developed an ultra-precise drone magnetometer technology, and documented that in just a few days it can cover an area that either cannot be covered in conventional mine clearance operations or that it would take a month to cover.

The inner child in many of us feels an overwhelming sense of joy when stumbling across a pile of the fluorescent, rubbery mixture of water, salt, and flour that put goo on the map: play dough. (Even if this happens rarely in adulthood.)

An international team of scientists, led by the University of Leeds, have assessed how robotics and autonomous systems might facilitate or impede the delivery of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

As robots are gradually introduced into various real-world environments, developers and roboticists will need to ensure that they can safely operate around humans. In recent years, they have introduced various approaches for estimating the positions and predicting the movements of robots in real-time.

Autonomous robots have come a long way since the fastidious Roomba. In recent years, artificially intelligent systems have been deployed in self-driving cars, last-mile food delivery, restaurant service, patient screening, hospital cleaning, meal prep, building security, and warehouse packing.