Guide dogs, dogs that are trained to help humans move through their environments, have played a critical role in society for many decades. These highly trained animals, in fact, have proved to be valuable assistants for visually impaired individuals, allowing them to safely navigate indoor and outdoor environments.
In recent years, computer scientists and roboticists have developed a variety of technological tools to aid human agents during critical missions, such as military operations or search and rescue efforts. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have proved to be particularly valuable in these cases, as they can often enter remote or dangerous areas that are inaccessible to humans.
Anyone with children knows that while controlling one child can be hard, controlling many at once can be nearly impossible. Getting swarms of robots to work collectively can be equally challenging, unless researchers carefully choreograph their interactions—like planes in formation—using increasingly sophisticated components and algorithms. But what can be reliably accomplished when the robots on hand are simple, inconsistent, and lack sophisticated programming for coordinated behavior?
Army and Arizona State University researchers identified a set of approaches to help scientists assess how well autonomous systems and humans communicate.
The Swiss robotics company ANYbotics has announced the launch of a new end-to-end robotic inspection system for the energy and industrial processing arenas. This solution aims to answer the call for better safety at production sites and lower downtime.
A team of researchers working at Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology has developed a skeletal-muscle-based, biohybrid soft robot that can swim faster than other skeletal-muscle-based biobots. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes building and testing their soft robot.
Ever wondered why your virtual home assistant doesn't understand your questions? Or why your navigation app took you on the side street instead of the highway? In a study published April 21st in the journal iScience, Italian researchers designed a robot that "thinks out loud" so that users can hear its thought process and better understand the robot's motivations and decisions.
To enable the efficient operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in instances where a global localization system (GPS) or an external positioning device (e.g., a laser reflector) is unavailable, researchers must develop techniques that automatically estimate a robot's pose. If the environment in which a drone operates does not change very often and one is able to build a 3D map of this environment, map-based robot localization techniques can be fairly effective.
Researchers at the University of Twente have discovered that primary school children in both regular and special needs schools make strides when they learn together with a robot. On 30 April, both Daniel Davison and Bob Schadenberg will obtain their Ph.D.s from UT, with comparable research but working in different contexts.
Multi-robot systems have recently been used to tackle a variety of real-world problems, for instance, helping human users to monitor environments and access secluded locations. In order to navigate unknown and dynamic environments most efficiently, these robotic systems should be guided by path planners, which can identify collision-free trajectories for individual robots in a team.
Spoken dialogue is the most natural way for people to interact with complex autonomous agents such as robots. Future Army operational environments will require technology that allows artificial intelligent agents to understand and carry out commands and interact with them as teammates.
From lizards to kangaroos, many animals with tails possess an agility that allows them to turn or self-right after a foot slip. Cheetahs demonstrate tremendous precision and maneuverability at high speeds due, in part, to their tails. Translating this performance to robots would allow them to move more easily through natural terrain. However, adding a tail to a robot carries disadvantages like increased mass, high inertia, and a higher energy cost.
Despite artificial intelligence and robotics adapting to many other areas of life and the work force, construction has long remained dominated by humans in neon caps and vests. Now, the robotics company Baubot has developed a Printstones robot, which they hope to supplement human construction workers onsite.
Carnegie Mellon University's acclaimed snake-like robot can now slither its way underwater, allowing the modular robotics platform to inspect ships, submarines and infrastructure for damage.
A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, has built a two-legged robot with t he ability to teach itself to walk using reinforcement learning. The team has written a paper describing their work and has uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server.