At EPFL's CREATE lab, under the guidance of Josie Hughes, a breakthrough has been made in the realm of soft robotics. Drawing inspiration from the versatile movement of elephant trunks and octopus tentacles, the team introduced the trimmed helicoid—a novel robotic structure that promises greater compliance and control in robotic designs.
With a drone camera, a survivor is spotted in the rubble. A robot on tracks brings him water while rescuers in exoskeletons clear an escape route for an autonomous stretcher to take her to safety.
Amazon's latest plan to use drones to deliver packages in the UK by the end of 2024 is essentially a relaunch. It was ten years ago that the company's founder Jeff Bezos first announced it would fly individual packages through the sky.
To safely share spaces with humans, robots should ideally be able to detect their presence and determine where they are located, so that they can avoid accidents and collisions. So far, most robots were trained to localize humans using computer vision techniques, which rely on cameras or other visual sensors.
Intelligent robots are reshaping our universe. In New Jersey's Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, AI-assisted robots are bringing a new level of security to doctors and patients by scanning every inch of the premises for harmful bacteria and viruses and disinfecting them with precise doses of germicidal ultraviolet light.
For the first time ever, researchers at the Surgical Robotics Laboratory of the University of Twente successfully made two microrobots work together to pick up, move and assemble passive objects in 3D environments. This achievement opens new horizons for promising biomedical applications.
Amazon employees have long worked alongside robots—but the company is now testing a very lifelike, two-legged machine to help its human co-workers with some tasks.
Bio-machine hybrid robots (BHRs) represent a new generation of micro-aerial vehicles that be controlled by building an interface between biological and artificial systems. In contrast to conventional bionic robots, they are free of complex mechanical structures, and due to the direct adoption of the animal body, they have superior movement characteristics and lower energy demand. Thus, BHRs can be applied in many important scenarios, such as urban and wilderness rescue operations, environmental monitoring and hazardous area surveys.
Taking inspiration from music streaming services, a team of engineers at the University of Michigan, Google and Georgia Tech has designed the simplest way for users to program their own exoskeleton assistance settings.
Implantation of a total artificial heart offers a solution for patients with severe heart failure, but existing artificial hearts have major limitations, which means there is a need for a better alternative. Through his doctoral research, Luuk van Laake has contributed to the development of a future artificial heart based on soft robotics.
Robotic prosthetic ankles that are controlled by nerve impulses allow amputees to move more "naturally," improving their stability, according to a new study from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Amazon will soon make prescription drugs fall from the sky when the e-commerce giant becomes the latest company to test drone deliveries for medications.
Now that improvements in technology mean that some robots work alongside humans, there is evidence that those humans have learned to see them as team-mates—and teamwork can have negative as well as positive effects on people's performance.
Anyone who has ever tried to pack a family-sized amount of luggage into a sedan-sized trunk knows this is a hard problem. Robots struggle with dense packing tasks, too.
Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have proposed a soft-packaged and portable rehabilitation glove with fine movement training. It is expected to serve the fine motor rehabilitation and daily living assistance for tens of millions of patients with hand dysfunction around the world.