All posts by Robotics News - Robot News, Robotics, Robots, Robotics Sciences

The streets are empty of cars in Ann Arbor, but robot traffic is up.

A cylindrical robot rolls into a treatment room to allow health care workers to remotely take temperatures and measure blood pressure and oxygen saturation from patients hooked up to a ventilator. Another robot that looks like a pair of large fluorescent lights rotated vertically travels throughout a hospital disinfecting with ultraviolet light. Meanwhile a cart-like robot brings food to people quarantined in a 16-story hotel. Outside, quadcopter drones ferry test samples to laboratories and watch for violations of stay-at-home restrictions.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have recently created PATRICK, an untethered soft robot that artificially replicates the structure and behavior of the brittle star, a marine invertebrate closely related to starfish. This unique bio-inspired robot, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, can crawl underwater using five legs actuated by shape-memory alloy (SMA) wires.

Robots that use artificial intelligence to recognise the health of fruit and vegetable crops and when they're ready to harvest are being trialled to help small, organic and greenhouse farmers with weeding and patrolling for pests.

Computer games are often more fun when friends are there to share the experience. A Sony PlayStation team wants to make sure that at times when players don't have their buddies around in person, they can turn to a robot friend for companionship.

Singapore researchers have invented a disinfecting robot with an arm that mimics human movement, to help take the load off overworked cleaners during the coronavirus pandemic.

In research published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, scientists explore whether people trust robots as they do fellow humans. These interactions are important to understand because trust-based interactions with robots are increasingly common in the marketplace, workplace, on the road and in the home. Results show people extend trust similarly to humans and robots but people's emotional reactions in trust-based interactions vary depending on partner type.

More and more industrial tasks are being performed by robots, but human operators are still needed for the more complex manipulation actions, such as handling and processing food products.

A lot of people have lower limb mobility impairments, but there are few wearable technologies to enable them to walk normally while performing tasks of daily living. XoSoft, a European funded project, has brought together partners from all over Europe to develop a flexible, lightweight and resource-efficient soft exoskeleton prototype.

Science fiction films such as Blade Runner (1982), Lars and the Real Girl (2007) and Her (2013) explore the advent of human-machine relationships. And in recent years, reality has met fiction.

For a robot to be able to "learn" sign language, it is necessary to combine different areas of engineering such as artificial intelligence, neural networks and artificial vision, as well as underactuated robotic hands. "One of the main new developments of this research is that we united two major areas of Robotics: complex systems (such as robotic hands) and social interaction and communication," explains Juan Víctores, one of the researchers from the Robotics Lab in the Department of Systems Engineering and Automation of the UC3M.

Hulking robots common to assembly line manufacturing tend to be loners. They often cut, bend and weld metal inside cages and behind barriers meant to safely separate them from human workers.

Brain Corp., which recently nearly tripled its orders from Walmart for self-driving, floor-scrubbing robots, is now making its first foray into Europe by opening a satellite office in the Netherlands.

Many work processes would be almost unthinkable today without robots. But robots operating in manufacturing facilities have often posed risks to workers because they are not responsive enough to their surroundings. To make it easier for people and robots to work in close proximity in the future, Prof. Matthias Althoff of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has developed a new system: IMPROV.

Standing upright and walking alone are very simple but noble motions that separate humans from many other creatures. Wearable and prosthetic technologies have emerged to augment human function in locomotion and manipulation. However, advances in wearable robot technology have been especially momentous to Byoung-Wook Kim, a triplegic for 22 years following a devastating car accident.