Fish are masters of coordinated motion. Schools of fish have no leader, yet individuals manage to stay in formation, avoid collisions, and respond with liquid flexibility to changes in their environment. Reproducing this combination of robustness and flexibility has been a long-standing challenge for human-engineered systems like robots.
For delivery robots, not all sidewalks are created equal—some are uneven or clogged with people and bus shelters—so researchers at Cornell Tech developed a "robotability score" and rated every street in New York City on how hospitable it would be to robots.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, have already proved to be valuable tools for a wide range of applications, ranging from film and entertainment production to defense and security, agriculture, logistics, construction and environmental monitoring. While these technologies are already widely used in many countries worldwide, engineers have been trying to enhance their capabilities further so that they can be used to tackle even more complex problems.
Tracking thousands of products in massive warehouses presents a logistical nightmare for many businesses. To address this, Kennesaw State University assistant professor Jian Zhang has introduced an autonomous robot that can log inventory.
At a time when we run ourselves ragged to meet society's expectations of productivity, performance and time optimization, is it right that our robot vacuum cleaners and other smart appliances should sit idle for most of the day?
Researchers have created a light-powered soft robot that can carry loads through the air along established tracks, similar to cable cars or aerial trams. The soft robot operates autonomously, can climb slopes at angles of up to 80 degrees, and can carry loads up to 12 times its weight.
A team of roboticists at Tsinghua University, working with a trio of colleagues from Beihang University, all in China, has designed a new type of microrobot that can continuously transform its shape and "lock" into specific configurations. In their paper published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, the group describes the factors that went into their design, the capabilities of the microrobots and possible uses for them.
To build the experimental stations of the future, scientists at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory, are learning from some of the challenges that face them today. As light source technologies and capabilities continue to advance, researchers must navigate increasingly complex workflows and swiftly evolving experimental demands.
For a robot, the real world is a lot to take in. Making sense of every data point in a scene can take a huge amount of computational effort and time. Using that information to then decide how to best help a human is an even thornier exercise.
New research led by Imperial College London and co-authored by the University of Bristol, has revealed that aerial robotics could provide wide-ranging benefits to the safety, sustainability and scale of construction.
Inspired by the movements of a tiny parasitic worm, Georgia Tech engineers have created a 5-inch soft robot that can jump as high as a basketball hoop.
In an experiment reminiscent of the "Transformers" movie franchise, engineers at Princeton University have created a type of material that can expand, assume new shapes, move and follow electromagnetic commands like a remotely controlled robot, even though it lacks any motor or internal gears.
Cornell University researchers have developed a new robotic framework powered by artificial intelligence—called RHyME (Retrieval for Hybrid Imitation under Mismatched Execution)—that allows robots to learn tasks by watching a single how-to video.
The likelihood of two human fingerprints being identical is extremely low—about 1 in 640 billion. Even identical twins, despite sharing the same genetic information, have unique fingerprints. A new technology now allows us to engrave these unique fingerprint patterns onto electronic skin, with the probability of matching an artificial fingerprint being 10²³² times lower than that of human fingerprints.
In one small step for robot-kind—thousands of them, really—humanoid robots ran alongside actual humans in a half-marathon in the Chinese capital on Saturday.