Sometimes you need to get human knowledge and skills to places that are hazardous or difficult to access for people. The project entitled Predictive Avatar Control and Feedback (PACOF) is creating a robotic system that allows the robot operator to experience the location just as the robot does. Three researchers representing the three different disciplines of the University of Twente's EEMCS faculty are working together in this project.
What would the world look like if socially skilled robots stepped into the roles normally reserved for humans?
So you need a robot that climbs stairs. What shape should that robot be? Should it have two legs, like a person? Or six, like an ant?
A new type of energy-generating synthetic skin could create more affordable prosthetic limbs and robots capable of mimicking the sense of touch, scientists say.
Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a technique for manufacturing micrometer-long machines by interlocking multiple materials in a complex way. Such microrobots will one day revolutionize the field of medicine.
When robots and humans interact in a shared environment, it is important for them to move in ways that prevent collisions or accidents. To reduce the risk of collisions, roboticists have developed numerous of techniques that monitor an environment, predict the future actions of humans moving in it, identify safe trajectories for a robot and control its movements accordingly.
Every backyard gardener knows how hard it can be to tell when to water the plants. Multiply that by tens or hundreds of acres and it's easy to see the challenges growers face keeping their crops healthy while managing water resources wisely.
Mosquitoes on Mars, metal birds flocking like pigeons and hoverflies with your lunch. Robots are copying nature.
Scientists from the U.S. Army and MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms created a new way to link materials with unique mechanical properties, opening up the possibility of future military robots made of robots.
Introducing the "Snugglebot" a cuddly robotic companion that needs your love and attention. It needs to be taken care of, cuddled and kept warm. It's physically comforting (soft, warm and weighted), and engaging. Its tusk lights up and it wiggles to get attention or to show appreciation when it's hugged.
A team of researchers from the University of Chemistry and Technology Prague, Yonsei University and the Brno University of Technology has developed a micro-robot with chemically encoded intelligence that can remove hormonal pollutants from a solution. They have published their results in Nature Machine Intelligence. Dongdong Jin and Li Zhang with the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Multiscale Medical Robotics Center, respectively, have published a News and Views piece in the same issue outlining the state of micro-robot research and describe the work done by the researchers with this new effort.
Asking someone to put on a mask is a touchy subject, so one shop in Japan has enlisted a robot to make sure its customers wear them during the pandemic.
Researchers in a joint research project led by a scientist from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) have developed an easy way to make millirobots, by coating objects with a glue-like, magnetic spray. Driven by the magnetic field, the coated objects can crawl, walk or roll on surfaces. As the magnetic coating is biocompatible and can be disintegrated into powders when needed, this technology demonstrates the potential for biomedical applications, including catheter navigation and drug delivery.
In the past year, lockdowns and other COVID-19 safety measures have made online shopping more popular than ever, but the skyrocketing demand is leaving many retailers struggling to fulfill orders while ensuring the safety of their warehouse employees.
New research that employs curved origami structures has dramatic implications in the development of robotics going forward, providing tunable flexibility—the ability to adjust stiffness based on function—that historically has been difficult to achieve using simple design.