All posts by Robotics News - Robot News, Robotics, Robots, Robotics Sciences

A coil-powered robot fish designed by scientists at the University of Bristol could make underwater exploration more accessible.

Most of the world is covered in oceans, which are unfortunately highly polluted. One of the strategies to combat the mounds of waste found in these very sensitive ecosystems—especially around coral reefs—is to employ robots to master the cleanup. However, existing underwater robots are mostly bulky with rigid bodies, unable to explore and sample in complex and unstructured environments, and are noisy due to electrical motors or hydraulic pumps.

Humans and horses have enjoyed a strong working relationship for nearly 10,000 years—a partnership that transformed how food was produced, people were transported and even how wars were fought and won. Today, we look to horses for companionship, recreation and as teammates in competitive activities like racing, dressage and showing.

Bistable structures in nature are unparalleled for their fast response and force amplification even with the minutest physical stimulation. Harnessing bistability and instability to rapidly release the stored energy in bistable structures could improve robot performance in several areas, e.g., high-speed locomotion, adaptive sensing and fast grasping.

Reaching into your pocket to retrieve your phone seems like no big deal. For a robot, however, it is. Like many routine gestures that we take for granted, it's actually very complex. Doing so requires large movements from the arm, followed by the hand's finer motions to grasp and pull the phone out.

Say "hello" to the robots of the future: They're soft and flexible enough to bounce off walls or squeeze into tight spaces. And when you're done with them, you can toss these machines into a compost bin to decompose.

Imagine lying on a bed, you just have to move your fingers to guide a mobile robot to bring you a cup of water, open the door to fetch some deliveries, or even do some laundry. If you are interested, you may want to learn more about a new remotely operated robotic system based on two mobile manipulators. This system was developed by roboticists from Osaka University. They published a research paper describing this robotic system in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems.

Search and rescue efforts following disasters like the massive earthquakes in Turkey and Syria are a race against time. Emergency response teams need to quickly identify voids or spaces in building rubble where survivors might be trapped, and before natural gas leaks, water main flooding or shifting concrete slabs take their toll.

Imagine that by only attaching a number of electromyography (EMG) sensors to your legs, your motion in the future several seconds can be predicted. Such a way of predicting motion via muscle states is an alternative to the mainstream visual cue-based motion prediction, which heavily relies on multi-view cameras to construct time-series posture. However, there is still a gap between muscle states and future movements.

In the vast, expansive skies where birds once ruled supreme, a new crop of aviators is taking flight. These pioneers of the air are not living creatures, but rather a product of deliberate innovation: drones. But these aren't your typical flying bots, humming around like mechanical bees. Rather, they're avian-inspired marvels that soar through the sky, guided by liquid neural networks to navigate ever-changing and unseen environments with precision and ease.

For the past three years, Terry Aberhart has watched the spindly, fixed-wing drones zip across the big skies over his farm in Canada's Saskatchewan province, testing a technology that could be the future of weeding.

A robot with the shape of a seed and the ability to explore the soil based on humidity changes has been developed. It is made of biodegradable materials and able to move within the surrounding environment without requiring batteries or other external sources of energy.

Their task is to monitor the condition of ecosystems, for instance in the forest floor—and crumble to dust when their work is done: bio-gliders modeled on the Java cucumber, which sails its seeds dozens of meters through the air. Empa researchers have developed these sustainable flying sensors from potato starch and wood waste.

A research article by scientists at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics developed a neural control algorithm to coordinate the adhesive toes and limbs of a climbing robot. The new research article, published in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems, provided a novel hybrid-driven climbing robot and introduced a neural control method based on CPG (Central Pattern Generator) for coordinating between adhesion and motion.

Differential geometry has been employed in previous studies to depict the finite and instantaneous motions of rigid bodies. The product of exponential (POE) formula based on differential geometry has been developed to describe the kinematics of articulated robots. This model can efficiently avoid model singularities and improve the robustness of parameter identification, compared with traditional methods based on Denavit-Hartenberg conventions.