As part of the ongoing war in Ukraine, one night in late November, Russia sent a swarm of 188 drones to attack Ukrainian infrastructure like electrical utilities, as well as residential areas, according to news reports. Ukrainian forces said they shot down 76 drones, but the damage was still extensive. Those kinds of attacks are continuing almost daily now.
Research in the International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics could lead to faster and more accurate robots for high-precision tasks in factories.
A team of roboticists at Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc. and the NeuroPiano Institute, in Kyoto, reports that a robotic exoskeleton strapped to the top of a piano player's hand allowed it to control the player's fingers during speed exercises, leading to improvements in playing fast-moving piano tunes. In their study, published in the journal Science Robotics, the group conducted experiments with their exoskeleton hand robot with more than 100 trained piano players.
Making Artificial Intelligence systems robustly perceive humans remains one of the most intricate challenges in computer vision. Among the most complex problems is reconstructing 3D models of human hands, a task with wide-ranging applications in robotics, animation, human-computer interaction, and augmented and virtual reality. The difficulty lies in the nature of hands themselves, often obscured while holding objects or contorted into challenging orientations during tasks like grasping.
A complex sense of touch for individuals living with spinal cord injuries is a step closer to reality. A study published in Science, paves the way for complex touch sensations through brain stimulation while using an extracorporeal bionic limb, that is attached to a chair or wheelchair. The paper is titled "Tactile edges and motion via patterned microstimulation of the human somatosensory cortex."
Accurate object pose estimation refers to the ability of a robot to determine both the position and orientation of an object. It is essential for robotics, especially in pick-and-place tasks, which are crucial in industries such as manufacturing and logistics.
The robotics industry should be creating robots that could be reprogrammed and repurposed for other tasks once its life span is completed, University of Bristol and University of West England researchers have advised.
Over the past decades, robotic systems have been rapidly advancing, fueled by the continuous introduction of more advanced electronics, mechanical components and software solutions. As a result, robots can easily become obsolete and outdated as newer systems emerge.
With a more efficient method for artificial pollination, farmers in the future could grow fruits and vegetables inside multilevel warehouses, boosting yields while mitigating some of agriculture's harmful impacts on the environment.
The behavior of a cat rubbing its head against a person, known as bunting, is an expression of affection and is believed to have a healing effect on humans.
Today's robots perform safety checks at industrial plants, conduct quality control in manufacturing, and are even starting to keep hospital patients company.
Researchers have been analyzing how humanoid robots relate to people and say teaching the machines how to understand emotion may be essential in getting the best from them.
Researchers at Stanford University, Princeton University, and Dexterity recently developed TidyBot++, a holonomic mobile robot that can perform various household chores and could help to train or test new algorithms for robotics applications.
In research published in Advanced Intelligence Systems, scientists have developed an innovative, soft, wearable robot to help workers avoid job-related injuries while lifting, lowering, and carrying objects.
Humans and animals are the key inspiration for many robotic systems developed to date, as they possess body structures that innately support efficient locomotion. While many bipedal (i.e., two-legged) robots are humanoids, meaning that their body resembles that of humans, others draw inspiration from other animals that walk on two legs, such as ostriches and some other birds.