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

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.

A collaborative project by researchers from Kings College London (KCL), University College London (UCL) and Moorfields Eye Hospital has defined the design and application of robots for reachability and dexterity for eye surgery.

A new approach to autonomous robot navigation is reported in the International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, which could help avoid collisions and accidents in a variety of future applications in various environments, such as industrial buildings and warehouses, agricultural fields, and in the urban self-driving vehicle landscape, search and rescue sites, in health care settings, and even in the home and garden.

The hottest drink of the summer may be the SEAS-colada. Here's what you need to make it: gin, pineapple juice, coconut milk and a dielectric elastomer actuator-based soft peristaltic pump. Unfortunately, the last component can only be found in the lab of Robert Wood, the Harry Lewis and Marlyn McGrath Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

On the moon, there are raw materials that humanity could one day mine and use. Various space agencies, such as the European Space Agency (ESA), are already planning missions to better explore Earth's satellite and find minerals. This calls for appropriate exploration vehicles. Swiss researchers led by ETH Zurich are now pursuing the idea of sending not just one solitary rover on an exploration tour, but rather an entire team of vehicles and flying devices that complement each other.

In a study published recently in Advanced Intelligent Systems, researchers from Queen Mary University of London have made significant advancements in the field of bionics with the development of a new type of electric variable-stiffness artificial muscle that possesses self-sensing capabilities. This innovative technology has the potential to revolutionize soft robotics and medical applications.