A swarm of 10 bright blue drones lifts off in a bamboo forest in China, then swerves its way between cluttered branches, bushes and over uneven ground as it autonomously navigates the best flight path through the woods.
A robot "chef" has been trained to taste food at different stages of the chewing process to assess whether it's sufficiently seasoned.
One of many special human qualities is the ability to handle objects with skill and precision. This is all down to our sense of touch, which is particularly acute in the tips of our fingers. Using our hands, we are able to explore the shape and composition of objects and to feel the texture of their surface—and all without ever clapping eyes on them.
Soft, pneumatic actuators might not be a phrase that comes up in daily conversations, but more likely than not you might have benefited from their utility. The devices use compressed air to power motion, and with sensing capabilities, they've proven to be a critical backbone in a variety of applications such as assistive wearables, robotics, and rehabilitative technologies.
In the quest to build smart skin that mimics the sensing capabilities of natural skin, ionic skins have shown significant advantages. They're made of flexible, biocompatible hydrogels that use ions to carry an electrical charge. In contrast to smart skins made of plastics and metals, the hydrogels have the softness of natural skin. This offers a more natural feel to the prosthetic arm or robot hand they are mounted on, and makes them comfortable to wear.
A mechanical jumper developed by UC Santa Barbara engineering professor Elliot Hawkes and collaborators is capable of achieving the tallest height—roughly 100 feet (30 meters)—of any jumper to date, engineered or biological. The feat represents a fresh approach to the design of jumping devices and advances the understanding of jumping as a form of locomotion.
A research team from Chemnitz and Dresden has taken a major step forward in the development of sensitive electronic skin (e-skin) with integrated artificial hairs. E-skins are flexible electronic systems that try to mimic the sensitivity of their natural human skin counterparts. Applications range from skin replacement and medical sensors on the body to artificial skin for humanoid robots and androids. Tiny surface hairs can perceive and anticipate the slightest tactile sensation on human skin and even recognize the direction of touch. Modern electronic skin systems lack this capability and cannot gather this critical information about their vicinity.
A research group from Robotics Institute of Beihang University, China has developed a novel multifunctional hexapod robot with leg-arm integration, named ALLOMAN (Arm-Leg Locomotion and Manipulation). This robot possesses various "fixed" manipulation functions besides locomotion, and the researchers have achieved mobile manipulation function on this robot successfully, which is difficult for legged robots. Their study can be found in the journal Frontiers of Mechanical Engineering on 8 April, 2022.
In April 2022, the project "Smart Electronic Olfaction for Body Odor Diagnostics"—SMELLODI for short—started with the kick-off meeting. The objective of the seven partners from Germany, Israel and Finland is to develop intelligent electronic sensor systems that can distinguish between healthy body odors and those altered by disease and transmit them digitally. Over a period of three years and with funding of almost 3 million euros, the technology developed is to pave the way for the digitization of the sense of smell.
A robot named Lyra has been used to inspect a ventilation duct in Dounreay's redundant nuclear laboratories and map radioactive materials. Lyra traversed 140m of duct from a single entry point and provided operators with detailed radiological characterization information that can now be used to help plan safe and efficient decommissioning of the laboratories.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS), Cornell University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University have developed collectives of microrobots which can move in any desired formation. The miniature particles are capable of reconfiguring their swarm behavior quickly and robustly. Floating on the surface of water, the versatile microrobotic disks can go round in circles, dance the boogie, bunch up into a clump, spread out like gas or form a straight line like beads on a string.
For decades, researchers worldwide have been trying to develop robots that can efficiently assist humans and work alongside them as they tackle a variety of everyday tasks. To do this effectively, however, the robots should be able to interact naturally with humans, including handing them and receiving objects from them.
With e-commerce orders pouring in, a warehouse robot picks mugs off a shelf and places them into boxes for shipping. Everything is humming along, until the warehouse processes a change and the robot must now grasp taller, narrower mugs that are stored upside down.
In a global first, scientists have demonstrated that molecular robots are able to accomplish cargo delivery by employing a strategy of swarming, achieving a transport efficiency five times greater than that of single robots.
When artificial intelligence systems encounter scenes where objects are not fully visible, they have to make estimations based only on the visible parts of the objects. This partial information leads to detection errors, and large training data is required to correctly recognize such scenes. Now, researchers at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology have developed a framework that allows robot vision to detect such objects successfully in the same way that we perceive them