Robotic systems have become increasingly sophisticated over the past decades, evolving from rudimental stiff robots to a wide range of soft, humanoid, animal-inspired robots. Legged robots, particularly quadrupeds, have been found to be particularly promising for tackling simple tasks at ground level, such as exploring environments and carrying objects.
Robotic exoskeletons designed to help humans with walking or physically demanding work have been the stuff of sci-fi lore for decades. Remember Ellen Ripley in that Power Loader in "Alien"? Or the crazy mobile platform George McFly wore in 2015 in "Back to the Future, Part II" because he threw his back out?
Whether it's a powered prosthesis to assist a person who has lost a limb or an independent robot navigating the outside world, we are asking machines to perform increasingly complex, dynamic tasks. But the standard electric motor was designed for steady, ongoing activities like running a compressor or spinning a conveyor belt—even updated designs waste a lot of energy when making more complicated movements.
A team of roboticists at California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working with a colleague from Carnegie Mellon University's, Robotic Institute, has developed a snake-like robot to investigate the terrain on Enceladus, Saturn's sixth-largest moon.
Theo works weekdays, weekends and nights and never complains about a sore spine despite performing hour upon hour of what, for a regular farm hand, would be backbreaking labor checking Dutch tulip fields for sick flowers.
Researchers at the University of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology recently developed Granulobot, a new modular robotic system that can change its physical shape to best navigate different environments.
Because they can go where humans can't, robots are especially uniquely suited for safely working with hazardous nuclear waste. But first, those robots need to become like the humans they are replacing, with arms and fingers that can closely mimic the movements of a person.
Soft robots use pliant materials such as elastomers to interact safely with the human body and other challenging, delicate objects and environments. A team of Rice University researchers has developed an analytical model that can predict the curing time of platinum-catalyzed silicone elastomers as a function of temperature. The model could help reduce energy waste and improve throughput for elastomer-based component manufacturing.
In recent years, roboticists and computer scientists have been trying to develop increasingly efficient methods to teach robots new skills. Many of the methods developed so far, however, require a large amount of training data, such as annotated human demonstrations of how to perform a task.
Researchers at University of Michigan recently developed SKOOTR, a tri-pedal skating robot that can efficiently move around in its surroundings without repeatedly flipping over. This robot, introduced in a paper posted to the preprint server arXiv, was found to be more stable than other three-legged robots, which often exhibit poor stability due to the lack of a fourth leg to better balance their body.
Auke Ijspeert and his team in the BioRobotics Lab (BioRob) in EPFL's School of Engineering had operated their bio-informed robots in natural environments before, but this was more for demonstration purposes than for scientific rigor. Tests of robotic function were usually carried out in the lab, for example, using X-ray videos to compare robotic movements with the animals that inspired their design.
Home robots could assist humans with the completion of various chores and manual tasks, ranging from washing dishes or doing the laundry to cooking, cleaning and tidying up. While many roboticists and computer scientists have tried to improve the skills of home robots in recent years, many of the robots developed so far are still unable to tackle more complex and creative tasks, such as cooking in collaboration with human users.
At the 2024 European Robotics Forum taking place in Rimini, Italy, researchers of Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT- Italian Institute of Technology) have shown the most recent results from the project SOPHIA: A collaborative robot to guide workers and relieve the burden of overhead tasks such as drilling, wearable robots to support the lifting and carrying of heavy loads physically, and wearable feedback devices to alert users about awkward postures.
If a robot traveling to a destination has just two possible paths, it needs only to compare the routes' travel time and probability of success. But if the robot is traversing a complex environment with many possible paths, choosing the best route amid so much uncertainty can quickly become an intractable problem.
The robot known as ANYmal has, for some time, had no problem coping with the stony terrain of Swiss hiking trails. Now researchers at ETH Zurich have taught this quadrupedal robot some new skills: It is proving rather adept at parkour, a sport based on using athletic maneuvers to smoothly negotiate obstacles in an urban environment, which has become very popular. ANYmal is also proficient at dealing with the tricky terrain commonly found on building sites or in disaster areas.