Engineers at the University of California San Diego have trained a humanoid robot to effortlessly learn and perform a variety of expressive movements, including simple dance routines and gestures like waving, high-fiving and hugging, all while maintaining a steady gait on diverse terrains.
How do people like to interact with robots when navigating a crowded environment? And what algorithms should roboticists use to program robots to interact with humans?
Northwestern University engineers have developed a new soft, flexible device that makes robots move by expanding and contracting—just like a human muscle.
Taking inspiration from the animal kingdom, Flinders University researchers are developing affordable, flexible and highly responsive 'whiskers' to attach to robots. Their article, "Optimising electromechanical whisker design for contact localisation," has been published in the journal Sensors and Actuators A: Physical.
A combined team of roboticists from Stanford University and the Toyota Research Institute has found that adding audio data to visual data when training robots helps to improve their learning skills. The team has posted their research on the arXiv preprint server.
It resembles a malevolent robot from 1980s sci-fi but West Japan Railway's new humanoid employee was designed with nothing more sinister than a spot of painting and gardening in mind.
As an undergraduate engineering student in Delhi, India, Amisha Bhaskar took a field trip to a facility for disabled war veterans and met a man who had lost both hands. When she asked him what technologies could improve his life, his reply left an indelible impression: He wanted something so he could take care of himself and not be forced to rely upon others.
A team led by University of Maryland computer scientists has invented a camera mechanism that improves how robots see and react to the world around them. Inspired by how the human eye works, their innovative camera system mimics the tiny involuntary movements used by the eye to maintain clear and stable vision over time.
Researchers have developed a lightweight fluidic engine to power muscle-mimicking soft robots for use in assistive devices. What sets the new engine apart is its ability to generate significant force without being tethered to an external power source.
The chief executive of drone delivery company Wing says 2024 is "the year of drone delivery." The company first went public in 2014 as a Google "moonshot" project and now operates in several cities in Australia, the United States and Finland, with plans to expand further.
Mountain View, California, residents will soon be able to order food, medicine and other small parcels to their homes via drone.
Improving the dexterity of robot hands could have significant implications for automating tasks such as handling goods for supermarkets or sorting through waste for recycling.
Amid the unpredictability and occasional chaos of emergency rooms, a robot has the potential to assist health care workers and support clinical teamwork, Cornell and Michigan State University researchers found.
Researchers at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology) have demonstrated that under specific conditions, humans can treat robots as co-authors of the results of their actions. The condition that enables this phenomenon is that a robot behaves in a human-like, social manner. Engaging in gaze contact and participating in a common emotional experience, such as watching a movie, are the key.
Robots are becoming an increasingly important part of our lives, performing jobs that are too dangerous for humans. This can often involve navigating complex environments, something rigid-bodied autonomous robots find difficult. Such robots faced similar challenges when miniaturized and used to model physics of living matter.