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.
Robots, AI and autonomous systems are increasingly being used in hospitals around the world. They help with a range of tasks, from surgical procedures and taking vital signs to helping out with security.
An initial series of test flights with drones has been launched in Poland as part of the EU-funded Uspace4UAM project. The first of these trials is now underway in Rzeszów, a city of close to 200,000 people.
Removing litter from oceans and seas is a costly and time-consuming process. As part of a European cooperative project, a team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) is developing a robotic system that uses machine learning methods to locate and collect waste under water.
Inspired by the natural dexterity of the human hand, a team of engineers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has created a reconfigurable hybrid robotics system that is able to grip a variety of objects: from the small, soft and delicate to the large, heavy and bulky. This technology is expected to impact a range of industries, involving food assembly, vertical farming and fast-moving consumer goods packaging, which will progressively automate more of their operations in the coming years.
Traditional robots can have difficulty grasping and manipulating soft objects if their manipulators are not flexible in the way elephant trunks, octopus tentacles, or human fingers can be.