Fish fins and insect wings are amazing pieces of natural engineering capable of efficiently moving their owners through water or air. People creating machines to swim or fly have long looked to animals as their models, designing airplanes with wings and boats with fin-shaped rudders. Over the past decades, researchers at Caltech and elsewhere have been exploring bioinspired engineering to see if other natural forms of motion might inform mechanical engineering.
LIG Nex1, a South Korean maker of electronic warfare and communications equipment, says it has paid $240 million for a 60% controlling stake in Ghost Robotics, a Philadelphia-based developer of the Vision 60 dog-like four-legged robots used by the military and law enforcement.
Yuichi Hirose has a dream—a dream that someday everyone will have access to a machine capable of knitting furniture.
Connecting multiple AIs together and putting them in the body of a robot, similar to Star Wars' C-3PO or R2-D2, is the most likely way AI will become as intelligent as humans, according to a scientist from the University of Sheffield.
Using only on-board sensors and cameras, researcher Julián Estévez, from the Computational Intelligence Group (GIC) of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) has developed low-cost, autonomous, navigation technology to prevent two or more drones whose paths cross in mid-air from colliding with each other. He has achieved positive, encouraging results.
Researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York have developed a self-powered "bug" that can skim across the water, and they hope it will revolutionize aquatic robotics.
Inspired by the paper-folding art of origami, North Carolina State University engineers have discovered a way to make a single plastic cubed structure transform into more than 1,000 configurations using only three active motors. The findings could pave the way for shape-shifting artificial systems that can take on multiple functions and even carry a load—like versatile robotic structures used in space, for example.
A team of computer scientists and roboticists with members from Texas A&M University in the U.S., and the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi, working with a colleague from Boston Dynamics, has configured a robot made by Boston Dynamics to seek out and stun weeds using a small blowtorch. The team has posted a paper describing their efforts to the arXiv preprint server.
A new type of valve that makes soft robots more resilient to damage, has been developed by engineers at the University of Sheffield.
Self-amputation may seem like a drastic move, but it's a survival tactic that's proved particularly handy for numerous creatures. Yale roboticists have drawn inspiration from lizards, crabs, and other animals who shed parts of themselves without looking back, all for the purpose of moving forward.
Self-driving cars occasionally crash because their visual systems can't always process static or slow-moving objects in 3D space. In that regard, they're like the monocular vision of many insects, whose compound eyes provide great motion-tracking and a wide field of view but poor depth perception.
Using a newly-devised complex algorithm, the researchers have created a perfectly choreographed "dance" using two robotic arms, continuously retaining a clear space between them—where a patient's body would fit—as well as ensuring a consistent magnetic field.
Carnegie Mellon University researchers at the Biohybrid and Organic Robotics Group (B.O.R.G.) led by Victoria Webster-Wood, in collaboration with researchers at Case Western Reserve University, are studying the sea slug feeding structure to learn more about how the brain, muscular system and nervous system interact. Their research is being used both in robots and in simulations as part of a multinational research collaboration studying neuromuscular systems.
Humans are interacting more than ever with artificial intelligence (AI)—from the development of the first "social robots" (a robot with a physical body programmed to interact and engage with humans) like Kismet in the 1990s to smart speakers such as Amazon's Alexa.
Most robotic systems developed to date can either tackle a specific task with high precision or complete a range of simpler tasks with low precision. For instance, some industrial robots can complete specific manufacturing tasks very well but cannot easily adapt to new tasks. On the other hand, flexible robots designed to handle a variety of objects often lack the accuracy necessary to be deployed in practical settings.