The ocean is teeming with life. But unless you get up close, much of the marine world can easily remain unseen. That's because water itself can act as an effective cloak: Light that shines through the ocean can bend, scatter, and quickly fade as it travels through the dense medium of water and reflects off the persistent haze of ocean particles. This makes it extremely challenging to capture the true color of objects in the ocean without imaging them at close range.
The wealth of information provided by our senses that allows our brain to navigate the world around us is remarkable. Touch, smell, hearing, and a strong sense of balance are crucial to making it through what to us seem like easy environments such as a relaxing hike on a weekend morning.
A research team has developed a novel haptic device designed to enhance both safety and efficiency for workers in industrial settings. This research was recently published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. The team was led by Professor Keehoon Kim and Ph.D. candidate Jaehyun Park from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at POSTECH.
Soft robots are known for their flexibility and adaptability, but most still rely on rigid electronic components for control and timing. A recent publication from researchers at Georgia Tech challenges that paradigm.
Humans no longer have exclusive control over training social robots to interact effectively, thanks to a new study from the University of Surrey and the University of Hamburg.
Nature is brimming with animals that collaborate in large numbers. Bees stake out the best feeding spots and let others know where they are. Ants construct complex hierarchical homes built for defense. Flocks of starlings move across the sky in beautiful formations as if they were a single entity.
Solving a Rubik's Cube is a challenge for most people. For a team of students from Purdue University's Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, it became an opportunity to redefine the limits of speed, precision and automation—and officially make history.
The ability to remotely control robots in real-time, also known as teleoperation, could be useful for a broad range of real-world applications. In recent years, some engineers have been trying to develop teleoperation systems that allow users to guide the actions of humanoid robots, which have a body structure resembling that of humans, getting the robots to precisely imitate their whole-body movements.
Scientists inspired by the octopus's nervous system have developed a robot that can decide how to move or grip objects by sensing its environment.
Amazon has just unveiled its newest warehouse robot called Vulcan, which has a "sense of touch." Designed to gently stow items using pressure-sensitive gripping and artificial intelligence (AI), Vulcan is now being tested in two Amazon facilities, in Spokane, Washington state, US, and Hamburg, Germany.
As demand for robotic delivery grows worldwide, an Australian-made design is leading the charge into a new era of temperature-controlled food delivery.
At less than one and a half inches tall, roughly the same height as a LEGO minifigure, the world's smallest self-contained bipedal robot can self-start from standstill, walk faster than a half mile per hour, turn, skip, and ascend small steps with just the power of its on-board battery, actuator, and control system.
A robotic hand developed at EPFL can pick up 24 different objects with human-like movements that emerge spontaneously, thanks to compliant materials and structures rather than programming.
The United States population is older than it has ever been. Today, the country's median age is 38.9, which is nearly a decade older than it was in 1980. And the number of adults older than 65 is expected to balloon from 58 million to 82 million by 2050. The challenge of caring for the elderly, amid shortages of care workers, rising health care costs, and evolving family structures, is an increasingly urgent societal issue.
Phase-change actuation has been revived for the era of untethered, electrically driven soft robots. Our team at the University of Coimbra have developed a phase transition soft actuator designed to power electric soft robots that require high force and precision. Our innovation leverages the liquid-to-gas phase transition of water to generate mechanical motion in a way that is simple, scalable, and remarkably powerful.