In Jimmy Wu's apartment, a scrum of mini robots bump, swerve, and zip chaotically across a tabletop. It looks like an aggressive bumper car rally, but within a few minutes, order emerges.
Engineering researchers from North Carolina State University have demonstrated a new type of flexible, robotic grippers that are able to lift delicate egg yolks without breaking them, and that are precise enough to lift a human hair. The work has applications for both soft robotics and biomedical technologies.
You have probably seen one flying above you at some point: a quadcopter, also known as a drone. These flying robots are becoming increasingly important in today's society, leading to stricter demands on their performance in terms of speed, accuracy, reliability and robustness. In order for these demands to be met, improvement of existing estimation and control algorithms is of crucial importance. In his research, Ph.D. candidate Alex Andriën has improved upon several existing methods for estimation and control of quadcopters by employing optimization-based techniques. He will defend his thesis on Monday 24th of February, 2022.
ETH Zurich researchers led by Marco Hutter developed a new control approach that enables a legged robot, called ANYmal, to move quickly and robustly over difficult terrain. Thanks to machine learning, the robot can combine its visual perception of the environment with its sense of touch for the first time.
A team of researchers from City University of Hong Kong, Dalian University of Technology, Tsinghua University and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China has developed a flexible skin patch that can provide haptic feedback to and from a person and a robot, allowing for teleoperated robots. They have published their results in Science Advances.
Robots could be invaluable allies for older adults and people with physical disabilities, as they could assist them in their day-to-day life and reduce their reliance on human carers. A type of robotic systems that could be particularly helpful are assisted feeding or bite-transfer robots, which are designed to pick up food from a plate and feed humans who are unable to move their arms or coordinate their movements.
Over the past few decades, computer scientists have been trying to train robots to tackle a variety of tasks, including house chores and manufacturing processes. One of the most renowned strategies used to train robots on manual tasks is imitation learning.
Many people love to visit the seaside, whether to enjoy the physical benefits of an exhilarating swim or simply to relax on the beach and catch some sun. But these simple, life-affirming pleasures are easily ruined by the presence of litter, which, if persistent, can have a serious negative impact on both the local environment and economy.
Medtronic CEO Geoff Martha has a simple message for the skeptics: despite some bumps in the road, the robots are coming.
Medtronic CEO Geoff Martha has a simple message for the skeptics: despite some bumps in the road, the robots are coming.
In the process of the construction and routine maintenance of the Chinese Space Station, the manipulator plays a significantly important role that can accomplish some key tasks, such as transposition docking, daily maintenance, and auxiliary extravehicular activities. The high accuracy and dynamic performance of the manipulator are necessar for the successful completion of these tasks, which can often be maintained by controls that are designed based on the dynamics model.
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, in collaboration with TCS Research and Wageningen University, recently devised a new strategy that could improve coordination among different robots tackling complex missions as a team. This strategy, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, is based on a split-architecture that addresses communication and computations separately, while periodically coordinating the two to achieve optimal results.
If you've ever ordered a product from Amazon, chances are that a robot selected your purchase from a shelf, read the barcode and delivered it to the counter for packaging. Hopefully, it didn't collide with a human worker on its journey and lose its way.
Driverless plows and autonomous tools to weed vegetable plots are the latest innovations ready to help farmers juggling labor shortages, climate change and environmental protection, while trying to feed a growing world population.
A lifelike, child-size doll writhed and cried before slightly shocked onlookers snapping smartphone pictures Wednesday at the CES tech show—where the line between cool and slightly disturbing robots can be thin.