A combined team of roboticists from Stanford University and the Toyota Research Institute has found that adding audio data to visual data when training robots helps to improve their learning skills. The team has posted their research on the arXiv preprint server.
It resembles a malevolent robot from 1980s sci-fi but West Japan Railway's new humanoid employee was designed with nothing more sinister than a spot of painting and gardening in mind.
As an undergraduate engineering student in Delhi, India, Amisha Bhaskar took a field trip to a facility for disabled war veterans and met a man who had lost both hands. When she asked him what technologies could improve his life, his reply left an indelible impression: He wanted something so he could take care of himself and not be forced to rely upon others.
A team led by University of Maryland computer scientists has invented a camera mechanism that improves how robots see and react to the world around them. Inspired by how the human eye works, their innovative camera system mimics the tiny involuntary movements used by the eye to maintain clear and stable vision over time.
Researchers have developed a lightweight fluidic engine to power muscle-mimicking soft robots for use in assistive devices. What sets the new engine apart is its ability to generate significant force without being tethered to an external power source.
The chief executive of drone delivery company Wing says 2024 is "the year of drone delivery." The company first went public in 2014 as a Google "moonshot" project and now operates in several cities in Australia, the United States and Finland, with plans to expand further.
Mountain View, California, residents will soon be able to order food, medicine and other small parcels to their homes via drone.
Improving the dexterity of robot hands could have significant implications for automating tasks such as handling goods for supermarkets or sorting through waste for recycling.
Amid the unpredictability and occasional chaos of emergency rooms, a robot has the potential to assist health care workers and support clinical teamwork, Cornell and Michigan State University researchers found.
Researchers at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology) have demonstrated that under specific conditions, humans can treat robots as co-authors of the results of their actions. The condition that enables this phenomenon is that a robot behaves in a human-like, social manner. Engaging in gaze contact and participating in a common emotional experience, such as watching a movie, are the key.
Robots are becoming an increasingly important part of our lives, performing jobs that are too dangerous for humans. This can often involve navigating complex environments, something rigid-bodied autonomous robots find difficult. Such robots faced similar challenges when miniaturized and used to model physics of living matter.
The Google-owned Waymo robotaxi service on Tuesday became available to anyone in San Francisco interested in hailing a driverless ride.
A city council in South Korea said Wednesday their first administrative officer robot was defunct after throwing itself down some stairs, with local media mourning the country's first robot suicide.
Researchers have found a way to bind engineered skin tissue to the complex forms of humanoid robots. This brings with it potential benefits to robotic platforms such as increased mobility, self-healing abilities, embedded sensing capabilities and an increasingly lifelike appearance.
As sub-symbolic AI, like deep learning, continues to advance, its limitations in safety and reliability are becoming more apparent. Verification and stability are crucial in safety-critical domains such as humanoid robotics, which is rapidly evolving into a versatile tool for various applications. However, proving the correctness of AI-based self-learning algorithms is challenging due to their uncertain inferences and opaque decision-making processes.