More than 8,000 man-made satellites orbit planet Earth today, many of which were launched into space decades ago. Repairing and maintaining the proper operation of these satellites is not always easy and often requires carefully planned and targeted interventions.
In nature, many organisms, such as octopuses with their flexible tentacles or elephants with their trunks, exhibit remarkable dexterity. Inspired by these natural structures, researchers aim to develop highly flexible continuum robots that offer robustness and safety.
In recent years, many research teams have been trying to design artificial skins with electronic properties for humanoid robots, smart prosthetics and other bio-inspired systems. These skins could sense the textures and tactile properties of objects, allowing various systems to plan their actions based on the information they detected.
The wing dynamics of flying animal species have been the inspiration for numerous flying robotic systems. While birds and bats typically flap their wings using the force produced by their pectoral and wing muscles, the processes underlying the wing movements of many insects remain poorly understood.
An international team of infectious disease researchers with the World Mosquito Program, working with colleagues from WeRobotics, has developed a way to release large numbers of mosquitoes infected with a mosquito-killing bacteria into the wild much more efficiently than current methods.
Robotic vehicles can optimize the flow of traffic in cities even when mixed in with vehicles driven by humans, thereby improving traffic efficiency, safety and energy consumption, my colleagues and I found.
A team of engineers and pest control specialists in China has developed a machine that is capable of gender-sorting 16 million mosquito pupae a week. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes how they designed and built their sorter and how well it has worked during testing.
Specific physical human-robot interactions are increasingly required in the manufacturing industry, the professional service sector, and health care. This necessitates improvements in comfort and convenience as well as in communication between humans and machines.
An analysis of how rhinoceros beetles deploy and retract their hindwings shows that the process is passive, requiring no muscular activity. The findings, reported in Nature, could help improve the design of flying micromachines.
At the top of many automation wish lists is a particularly time-consuming task: chores.
To be deployed in a broad range of real-world dynamic settings, robots should be able to successfully complete various manual tasks, ranging from household chores to complex manufacturing or agricultural processes. These manual tasks entail grasping, manipulating and placing objects of different types, which can vary in shape, weight, properties and textures.
Dutch scientists have unveiled the country's first laboratory to research how autonomous miniature drones can mimic insects to accomplish tasks ranging from finding gas leaks in factories to search-and-rescue missions.
Haptic feedback stands as a cornerstone for the authenticity and depth of engagement in virtual reality and teleoperation systems. Yet, existing haptic devices have grappled with the fidelity of replicating tactile properties, hindered by the constraints on their degrees of freedom and expressive range. This limitation has ignited an urgent quest for innovative solutions that can augment the responsiveness and adaptability of haptic systems.
The future deployment of AIs and robots in our everyday work and life, from fully automated vehicles, to delivery robots, and AI assistants, could either be done by making increasingly capable agents that can do many tasks, or simpler more narrow agents that are designed for specific tasks.
Fish fins and insect wings are amazing pieces of natural engineering capable of efficiently moving their owners through water or air. People creating machines to swim or fly have long looked to animals as their models, designing airplanes with wings and boats with fin-shaped rudders. Over the past decades, researchers at Caltech and elsewhere have been exploring bioinspired engineering to see if other natural forms of motion might inform mechanical engineering.