Better, faster artificial intelligence is fueling a rise in human-like robots for customer service at places like hotels and airports, especially in areas outside the U.S. But many robots still fail to connect with people, instead creeping us out with fake smiles and jittery movements.
A team led by Prof. Dong Erbao from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), collaborating with Prof. Yu Xinge from the City University of Hong Kong, developed a novel tactile perception method based on flexible grating structural color. The work was published in National Science Review.
A team of roboticists at the Beijing Institute of Technology, working with a pair of colleagues from the Technical University of Munich, has created a new kind of rat robot—one that was designed to interact in social ways with real rats.
Like waves sweeping through tiny stadium crowds, microscopic machines engineered by Cornell researchers can autonomously synchronize their movements, opening new possibilities for the use of microrobots in drug delivery, chemical mixing and environmental remediation, among other applications.
A team has developed flexible fibers with self-healing, light-emitting and magnetic properties. The scalable hydrogel-clad ionotronic nickel-core electroluminescent (SHINE) fiber is bendable, emits highly visible light, and can automatically repair itself after being cut, regaining nearly 100% of its original brightness. In addition, the fiber can be powered wirelessly and manipulated physically using magnetic forces.
Quadruped robots integrating manipulators could potentially tackle tasks that entail manipulating objects while swiftly moving around in their surrounding environment. These include tasks such as collecting the trash around the house, collecting specific objects and bringing them to humans or depositing target items at specific locations.
A team of roboticists at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, working with a colleague from the University of California, has designed, built and demonstrated a bird-like robot that can launch itself into flight using spring-like legs.
In 2018, Google DeepMind's AlphaZero program taught itself the games of chess, shogi, and Go using machine learning and a special algorithm to determine the best moves to win a game within a defined grid. Now, a team of Caltech researchers has developed an analogous algorithm for autonomous robots—a planning and decision-making control system that helps freely moving robots determine the best movements to make as they navigate the real world.
A team of researchers has beaten its own record for the fastest swimming soft robot, drawing inspiration from manta rays to improve their ability to control the robot's movement in the water.
Electronic skins (e-skins) are flexible sensing materials designed to mimic the human skin's ability to pick up tactile information when touching objects and surfaces. Highly performing e-skins could be used to enhance the capabilities of robots, to create new haptic interfaces and to develop more advanced prosthetics.
Cornell researchers in physics and engineering have created the smallest walking robot yet. Its mission: to be tiny enough to interact with waves of visible light and still move independently, so that it can maneuver to specific locations—in a tissue sample, for instance—to take images and measure forces at the scale of some of the body's smallest structures.
A QUT research team has taken inspiration from the brains of insects and animals for more energy-efficient robotic navigation.
One of the most promising approaches to teaching robots how to complete manual tasks such as cleaning dishes or preparing food is known as imitation learning. End-to-end imitation learning typically entails training a deep learning algorithm on raw videos, images and/or motion capture data of humans completing manual tasks.
Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are omnipresent and have grown in popularity due to their wide potential use in many civilian sectors. Equipped with sophisticated sensors and communication devices, drones can potentially form a multi-UAV system, also called a swarm.
To assist humans with household chores and other everyday manual tasks, robots should be able to effectively manipulate objects that vary in composition, shape and size. The manipulation skills of robots have improved significantly over the past few years, in part due to the development of increasingly sophisticated cameras and tactile sensors.