When it comes to powering mobile robots, batteries present a problematic paradox: the more energy they contain, the more they weigh, and thus the more energy the robot needs to move. Energy harvesters, like solar panels, might work for some applications, but they don't deliver power quickly or consistently enough for sustained travel.
Last year, a team of biologists and computer scientists from Tufts University and the University of Vermont (UVM) created novel, tiny self-healing biological machines from frog cells called "Xenobots" that could move around, push a payload, and even exhibit collective behavior in the presence of a swarm of other Xenobots.
While a Mars rover can explore where no person has gone before, a smaller robot at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia could climb to new heights by mimicking the movements of a lizard.
Not long after the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, Czech writer Karel Čapek first introduced the term "robot" to describe artificial people in his 1921 sci-fi play R.U.R. While we have not yet created the highly intelligent humanoid robots imagined by Čapek, the robots most commonly used today are complex systems that work alongside humans, assisting with an ever-expanding set of tasks.
Boston Dynamics, the company many people know for its dog robot Spot, has unveiled a new bot targeting warehouses.
Living organisms, from bacteria to animals and humans, can perceive their environment and process, store and retrieve this information. They learn how to react to later situations using appropriate actions. A team of physicists at Leipzig University led by Professor Frank Cichos, in collaboration with colleagues at Charles University Prague, have developed a method for giving tiny artificial microswimmers a certain ability to learn using machine learning algorithms. They recently published a paper on this topic in the journal Science Robotics.
Engineers at Duke University have developed an electronics-free, entirely soft robot shaped like a dragonfly that can skim across water and react to environmental conditions such as pH, temperature or the presence of oil. The proof-of-principle demonstration could be the precursor to more advanced, autonomous, long-range environmental sentinels for monitoring a wide range of potential telltale signs of problems.
A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Germany, from Seoul National University in Korea and from the Harvard University in the US, successfully developed a predictive model and closed-loop controller of a soft robotic fish, designed to actively adjust its undulation amplitude to changing flow conditions and other external disturbances. Their work "Modeling and Control of a Soft Robotic Fish with Integrated Soft Sensing" was published in Wiley's Advanced Intelligent Systems journal, in a special issue on "Energy Storage and Delivery in Robotic Systems."
There are some tasks that traditional robots—the rigid and metallic kind—simply aren't cut out for. Soft-bodied robots, on the other hand, may be able to interact with people more safely or slip into tight spaces with ease. But for robots to reliably complete their programmed duties, they need to know the whereabouts of all their body parts. That's a tall task for a soft robot that can deform in a virtually infinite number of ways.
People are not very nice to machines. The disdain goes beyond the slot machine that emptied your wallet, a dispenser that failed to deliver a Coke or a navigation system that took you on an unwanted detour.
Researchers from the Graduate School of Engineering and Symbiotic Intelligent Systems Research Center at Osaka University used motion capture cameras to compare the expressions of android and human faces. They found that the mechanical facial movements of the robots, especially in the upper regions, did not fully reproduce the curved flow lines seen in the faces of actual people. This research may lead to more lifelike and expressive artificial faces.
The Ph.D. thesis by Daniel Teso-Fernández de Betoño of the UPV/EHU Faculty of Engineering in Vitoria-Gasteiz has resulted in a mobile, collaborative platform capable of performing tasks in motion at the Mercedes-Benz plant in the capital of Alava. The research opens up a new field for improving the ergonomics of these workstations and for the robot and human to collaborate by performing tasks together.
If you want to build a fully functional nanosized robot, you need to incorporate a host of capabilities, from complicated electronic circuits and photovoltaics to sensors and antennas.
Recent technological advancements have enabled the development of new tools to assist people with different types of disabilities, allowing them to move more freely in their surroundings and complete a number of everyday tasks. These include a broad range of smart technologies and devices, ranging from home assistants to mobile robots and bionic limbs.
Digit marches on two legs across the floor of the University of Michigan's Ford Motor Co. Robotics Building, while Mini-Cheetah—staccato-like—does the same on four and the yellow-legged Cassie steps deliberately side-to-side.