Humans are able to find objects in their surroundings and detect some of their properties simply by touching them. While this skill is particularly valuable for blind individuals, it can also help people with no visual impairments to complete simple tasks, such as locating and grabbing an object inside a bag or pocket.
Robots are rapidly making their way into a variety of settings, including industrial and manufacturing facilities. So far, they have shown great potential for speeding up and automating a number of manufacturing processes by substituting or assisting human workers on assembly lines. To be adopted on a large scale, however, robots for manufacturing should be both efficient and relatively affordable.
Researchers from MBARI, the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (UH Mānoa), and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, after years of development and testing, have successfully demonstrated that a fleet of autonomous robots can track and study a moving microbial community in an open-ocean eddy. The results of this research effort were recently published in Science Robotics.
Schools of fish exhibit complex, synchronized behaviors that help them find food, migrate and evade predators. No one fish or team of fish coordinates these movements nor do fish communicate with each other about what to do next. Rather, these collective behaviors emerge from so-called implicit coordination—individual fish making decisions based on what they see their neighbors doing.
Minimally invasive surgeries in which surgeons gain access to internal tissues through natural orifices or small external excisions are common practice in medicine. They are performed for problems as diverse as delivering stents through catheters, treating abdominal complications, and performing transnasal operations at the skull base in patients with neurological conditions.
Robotics researchers at the University of Zurich show how onboard cameras can be used to keep damaged quadcopters in the air and flying stably—even without GPS.
AI is making stunning inroads in the fields of medicine and science. It is helping to cure disease, combat global warming, grow crops and provide cleaner, cheaper energy.
Even though the event is virtual, CES delivers no shortage of big screens or nifty gadgets. But let's be real: both of those are lame compared to the robots.
Robots that helped people survive and stay safe over the past year are touting their value at the tech industry's annual extravaganza amid a pandemic which has given fresh momentum to the robotics sector.
Like a longtime couple who can predict each other's every move, a Columbia Engineering robot has learned to predict its partner robot's future actions and goals based on just a few initial video frames.
Predicting when and how collections of particles, robots, or animals become orderly remains a challenge across science and engineering.
Predicting when and how collections of particles, robots, or animals become orderly remains a challenge across science and engineering.
These robots have rhythm.
Multi-domain operations, the Army's future operating concept, requires autonomous agents with learning components to operate alongside the warfighter. New Army research reduces the unpredictability of current training reinforcement learning policies so that they are more practically applicable to physical systems, especially ground robots.
Robotic systems packed with muscle tissue can produce never-seen-before agility and versatility, Army researchers said.