To interact with humans and assist them in their day-to-day life, robots should have both verbal and non-verbal communication capabilities. In other words, they should be able to understand both what a user is saying and what their behavior indicates, adapting their speech, behavior and actions accordingly.
Engineers at the University of California San Diego have built a squid-like robot that can swim untethered, propelling itself by generating jets of water. The robot carries its own power source inside its body. It can also carry a sensor, such as a camera, for underwater exploration.
Robots can be amazing tools for search-and-rescue missions and environmental studies, but eventually they must return to a base to recharge their batteries and upload their data. That can be a challenge if your robot is an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) exploring deep ocean waters.
A team of researchers from the University of California, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has found that insects use natural oscillations to stabilize their flight. In their study, published in the journal Science Robotics, the researchers used what they describe as "a type of calculus" (chronological calculus) to better understand the factors that are involved in keeping flapping winged insects aloft. Matěj Karásek, with Delft University of Technology has published a Focus piece in the same journal issue describing the work done by the team on this new effort.
Would you trust your life to an autonomous vehicle? Do you understand how it will respond in dangerous situations? Are you willing to get in without knowing the risks?
The way humans interpret the behavior of AI-endowed artificial agents, such as humanoid robots, depends on specific individual attitudes that can be detected from neural activity. Researchers at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) demonstrated that people's bias toward robots—that is, attributing intentionality or considering them as "mindless things"—can be correlated with distinct brain activity patterns. The research results have been published in Science Robotics and are important for understanding the way humans engage with robots, while also considering their acceptance in healthcare applications and daily life.
Vanderbilt University engineers have determined that their back-assist exosuit, a clothing-like device that supports human movement and posture, can reduce fatigue by an average of 29-47 percent in lower back muscles. The exosuit's functionality presents a promising new development for individuals who work in physically demanding fields and are at risk for back pain, including medical professionals and frontline workers.
Tensegrity is a design principle that has often been applied by artists, architects and engineers to build a wide range of structures, including sculptures, frames and buildings. This principle essentially describes the dynamics that occur when a structure maintains its stability via a pervasive tensional force.
Researchers at Yale have developed a robotic fabric, a breakthrough that could lead to such innovations as adaptive clothing, self-deploying shelters, or lightweight shape-changing machinery.
An international team of Johannes Kepler University researchers is developing robots made from soft materials. A new article in the journal Communications Materials demonstrates how these kinds of soft machines react using weak magnetic fields to move very quickly—even grabbing a quick-moving fly that has landed on it.
A combined team of researchers from Korea and Germany has built an AI-based curling robot that is able to compete at a professional level. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes how their robot was built, how it was trained and how well it performed when matched against professional human players. Johannes Stork with Örebro University has published a Focus piece discussing the work by the team in the same journal issue.
Back in 2013, local Brooklyn papers were excitedly reporting on a new initiative aimed at getting residents involved in cleaning up the highly polluted Gowanus Canal. Brooklyn Atlantis, as the project was known, was the brainchild of NYU Tandon Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Maurizio Porfiri, who envisioned building and launching robotic boats to collect water-quality data and capture images of the infamous canal, which citizen scientists would then view and help classify. Those robotic boats ultimately led to the formation of the company Manifold Robotics, which aimed to further develop the unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) with sensor technology. (The fledgling company received support from PowerBridgeNY, a collaborative initiative to bring university research to market.) More recently, the startup has now branched out to develop a mobile data collection platform that allows unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to operate safely in the sky near power lines.
Robots will help H-E-B grocery stores keep up with the growing demand for online grocery services amid the pandemic.
Robots will help H-E-B grocery stores keep up with the growing demand for online grocery services amid the pandemic.
In the current issue of Science Robotics, researchers from Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT- Italian Institute of Technology) and Centro Protesi INAIL in Italy reported on their ability to replicate the key biological properties of the human hand: natural synergistic and adaptable movement, biomimetic levels of force and speed, high anthropomorphism and grasp robustness. Developed by a collaborative of researchers, orthopaedists, industrial designers and patients, the prostetic hand called Hannes is able to restore over 90% of functionality to people with upper-limb amputations.