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.
Robots are writing more of what we read on the internet. And artificial intelligence (AI) writing tools are becoming freely available for anyone, including students, to use.
Biologists have long experienced the challenges of documenting ocean life, with many species of fish proving quite sensitive to the underwater movements of humans.
If a robot worker makes a mistake on the job, or annoys customers, businesses may not give it a pink slip and a cardboard box for its office belongings, but companies may be forced to shut down these expensive machines, according to a team of researchers.
It's whip fast, obeys commands and doesn't leave unpleasant surprises on the floor—meet the AlphaDog, a robotic response to two of China's burgeoning loves: pets and technology.
Working safely is not only about processes, but context—understanding the work environment and circumstances, and being able to predict what other people will do next. A new system empowers robots with this level of context awareness, so they can work side-by-side with humans on assembly lines more efficiently and without unnecessary interruptions.
It is more complicated than copy and paste, but digital twins could be the way of future manufacturing according to researchers from the University of Kentucky. They developed a virtual environment based on human-robot interactions that can mirror the physical set up of a welder and their project. Called a digital twin, the prototype has implications for evolving manufacturing systems and training novice welders. They published their work in the IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica.
A small team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley has developed a robot dog to help in ways similar to real guide dogs. They have written a paper describing their robot guide dog and have uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server. They have also posted two videos demonstrating the capabilities of their robot on YouTube.
Sophia is a robot of many talents—she speaks, jokes, sings and even makes art. In March, she caused a stir in the art world when a digital work she created as part of a collaboration was sold at an auction for $688,888 in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT).
A team of researchers from the Harbin Institute of Technology along with partners at the First Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, both in China, has developed a tiny robot that can ferry cancer drugs through the blood-brain barrier (BBB) without setting off an immune reaction. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes their robot and tests with mice. Junsun Hwang and Hongsoo Choi, with the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology in Korea, have published a Focus piece in the same journal issue on the work done by the team in China.
In recent years, robots have gained artificial vision, touch, and even smell. "Researchers have been giving robots human-like perception," says MIT Associate Professor Fadel Adib. In a new paper, Adib's team is pushing the technology a step further. "We're trying to give robots superhuman perception," he says.
This research project was originated from the collaboration between two institutions with their respective expertise: The TIPs laboratory of the ULB, in Belgium, which is a group dedicated to the study of transport phenomena and fluid interfaces, and the AS2M department of the FEMTO-ST institute, in France, specialized in microrobotics. And thus, ThermoBot was born, a new kind of manipulation platform working on the air-water interface. ThermoBot uses an original actuation mechanism, an infrared laser that locally heats the air-water interface, triggering so-called thermocapillary flows. Combining our specialties in interfacial phenomena and robotics, we were able to use this flow to displace floating components in a controlled manner.