Albert Einstein famously postulated that "the only real valuable thing is intuition," arguably one of the most important keys to understanding intention and communication.
Researchers at Bilkent University in Turkey have recently created a small quadruped robot called SQuad, which is made of soft structural materials. This unique robot, presented in a paper published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, is more flexible than existing miniature robots and is thus better at climbing or circumventing obstacles in its surroundings.
Robots could soon assist humans in a variety of fields, including in manufacturing and industrial settings. A robotic system that can automatically assemble customized products may be particularly desirable for manufacturers, as it could significantly decrease the time and effort necessary to produce a variety of products.
When children play with toys, they learn about the world around them—and today's robots aren't all that different. At UC Berkeley's Robot Learning Lab, groups of robots are working to master the same kinds of tasks that kids do: placing wood blocks in the correct slot of a shape-sorting cube, connecting one plastic Lego brick to another, attaching stray parts to a toy airplane.
One of the ways we experience the world around us is through our skin. From sensing temperature and pressure to pleasure or pain, the many nerve endings in our skin tell us a great deal.
Researchers at the University of Surrey have recently developed self-organizing algorithms inspired by biological morphogenesis that can generate formations for multi-robot teams, adapting to the environment they are moving in. Their recent study, featured in IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, was partly funded by the European Commission's FP7 program.
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.