Pangolins are fascinating creatures. This animal looks like a walking pine cone, as it is the only mammal completely covered with hard scales. The scales are made of keratin, just like our hair and nails. The scales overlap and are directly connected to the underlying soft skin layer. This special arrangement allows the animals to curl up into a ball in case of danger.
New work from Carnegie Mellon University has enabled robots to learn household chores by watching videos of people performing everyday tasks in their homes.
Research in the field of robotics has been booming over the past decade with a view to tackle challenges of real value to industry and the public domain. With new robotic systems appearing every other day, developing reliable tools that can be used to evaluate their performance and test algorithms underpinning their functioning is salient.
AI-powered robots have become increasingly sophisticated and are gradually being introduced in a wide range of real-world settings, including malls, airports, hospitals and other public spaces. In the future, these robots could also assist humans with house chores, office errands and other tedious or time-consuming tasks.
Traditionally, soft robots have been made using synthetic polymers, rubbers, and plastics. Such materials provide soft robots with long operational lives and stable structures, but may pose risks to the environment if lost or damaged during use. Researchers seek to minimize this risk by creating new ways to build naturally decomposable robots.
The red eye that refuses to be extinguished, the metal body that cannot be crushed—for many of us the word "robot" conjures one image: the Terminator.
Singapore will "progressively deploy" more patrol robots across the city-state, police said Thursday, after more than five years of small-scale trials.
The basic configuration of traditional propellers has not fundamentally changed since the first powered flight by the Wright brothers in 1903.
We've all heard the phrase, "dogs are a human's best friend."
Researchers led by the University of California San Diego have developed a new model that trains four-legged robots to see more clearly in 3D. The advance enabled a robot to autonomously cross challenging terrain with ease—including stairs, rocky ground and gap-filled paths—while clearing obstacles in its way.
Connecting artificial intelligence systems to the real world through robots and designing them using principles from evolution is the most likely way AI will gain human-like cognition, according to research from the University of Sheffield.
In the film "Top Gun: Maverick," Maverick, played by Tom Cruise, is charged with training young pilots to complete a seemingly impossible mission—to fly their jets deep into a rocky canyon, staying so low to the ground they cannot be detected by radar, then rapidly climb out of the canyon at an extreme angle, avoiding the rock walls. Spoiler alert: With Maverick's help, these human pilots accomplish their mission.
By combining inspiration from the digital world of polygon meshing and the biological world of swarm behavior, the Mori3 robot can morph from 2D triangles into almost any 3D object. The EPFL research, which has been published in Nature Machine Intelligence, shows the promise of modular robotics for space travel.
Modern-day society relies intrinsically on automated systems and artificial intelligence. It is embedded into our daily routines and shows no signs of slowing, in fact use of robotic and automated assistance is ever-increasing.
A team of material scientists and electronic engineers at MIT, has developed a way to create magnetic soft robots by combining fiber-based fabrication systems with mechanical and magnetic programming methods to provide locomotion under unidirectional magnetic fields. In their paper published in the journal Advanced Materials, the group describes how they overcame problems faced by others attempting to create magnetically controlled soft robots and outline the design of the robots they created.