Inspired by the effortless way humans handle objects without seeing them, a team led by engineers at the University of California San Diego has developed a new approach that enables a robotic hand to rotate objects solely through touch, without relying on vision.
In recent decades, roboticists have been developing increasingly sophisticated robots inspired by nature and living organisms. By realistically emulating biological processes and animal behaviors, these robots can often navigate different environments and tackle real-world problems in highly effective ways.
What happens to the body when a human gets heatstroke? How can we protect ourselves in a warming planet? To answer these burning questions, Arizona researchers have deployed a robot that can breathe, shiver and sweat.
A back support exoskeleton has been developed at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology—IIT) to improve railway workers' safety and conditions for heavy manual material handling during maintenance and renewal operations.
Ireland's Robot Soccer team, RoboÉireann from Maynooth University, are Challenge Shield winners in the RoboCup 2023 Standard Platform League, an international robotics competition held in Bordeaux, France.
A new USC study finds that by sharing knowledge with each other at the same time, AI agents can quickly learn a wider range of tasks, with applications in medicine and beyond.
A research group in Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute is creating the next generation of explorers—robots.
A team of social scientists, neurologists and psychiatrists at the University of Southern California's Brain and Creativity Institute, working with colleagues from the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, the University of Central Florida and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA have published a Viewpoint piece in the journal Science Robotics outlining a new approach to giving robots empathy. In their paper, they suggest that traditional approaches may not work.
Robotic fabrics that can shrink, grow in size and move with precision are becoming a reality, thanks to new research from scientists at the University of Sheffield.
This robot can swim under the sand and dig itself out too, thanks to two front limbs that mimic the oversized flippers of turtle hatchlings.
Imagine purchasing a robot to perform household tasks. This robot was built and trained in a factory on a certain set of tasks and has never seen the items in your home. When you ask it to pick up a mug from your kitchen table, it might not recognize your mug (perhaps because this mug is painted with an unusual image, say, of MIT's mascot, Tim the Beaver). So, the robot fails.
With the advancement of ocean detection technology, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have become an indispensable tool for exploring unknown underwater environments. However, existing sensors cannot enable AUVs to identify the environment in narrow spaces where optical or sonic reflection problems may occur.
Researchers from the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed an automatic process for making soft sensors. These universal measurement cells can be attached to almost any kind of object. Applications are envisioned especially in robotics and prosthetics.
Your brand new household robot is delivered to your house, and you ask it to make you a cup of coffee. Although it knows some basic skills from previous practice in simulated kitchens, there are way too many actions it could possibly take—turning on the faucet, flushing the toilet, emptying out the flour container, and so on. But there's a tiny number of actions that could possibly be useful. How is the robot to figure out what steps are sensible in a new situation?
Although grasping objects is a relatively straightforward task for us humans, there is a lot of mechanics involved in this simple task. Picking up an object requires fine control of the fingers, of their positioning, and of the pressure each finger applies, which in turn necessitates intricate sensing capabilities. It's no wonder that robotic grasping and manipulation is a very active research area within the field of robotics.