In early November, the Commonwealth Department of Infrastructure invited public comment on proposed Australia-wide "drone delivery guidelines" it has been quietly developing with industry stakeholders. A slick new website—drones.gov.au—boasts of the supposed benefits of delivery drones. It claims they will create jobs, provide cost-efficiency and be environmentally sustainable.
Researchers at Paderborn University in Germany have built a robot that can knock a ball into a hole using a club on a putting green on most attempts. Annika Junker, Niklas Fittkau, Julia Timmermann and Ansgar Trächtler have published a paper on the arXiv preprint server describing their robot and its performance.
Borrowing from methods used to produce optical fibers, researchers from EPFL and Imperial College have created fiber-based soft robots with advanced motion control that integrate other functionalities, such as electric and optical sensing and targeted delivery of fluids.
Researchers at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) in Korea have recently developed a deep learning-based model that could help to produce engaging nonverbal social behaviors, such as hugging or shaking someone's hand, in robots. Their model, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, can actively learn new context-appropriate social behaviors by observing interactions among humans.
More sophisticated robots are on the way, accelerating a drive to ensure they help workers rather than take their place.
Researchers at MIT have made significant steps toward creating robots that could practically and economically assemble nearly anything, including things much larger than themselves, from vehicles to buildings to larger robots.
Amoebae are single-cell organisms. By means of self-organization, they can form complex structures—and do this purely through local interactions: If they have a lot of food, they disperse evenly through a culture medium. But if food becomes scarce, they emit the messenger known as cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP). This chemical signal induces amoebae to gather in one place and form a multicellular aggregation. The result is a fruiting body.
Researchers from Hanyang University and Inha University have introduced collective behavior of multiple swimming robots for delivery of thousands of cargos.
Inspired by the biomechanics of the manta ray, researchers at North Carolina State University have developed an energy-efficient soft robot that can swim more than four times faster than previous swimming soft robots. The robots are called "butterfly bots," because their swimming motion resembles the way a person's arms move when they are swimming the butterfly stroke.
CSU researchers have created the first successful soft robotic gripper capable of manipulating individual droplets of liquid, according to a recent article in the journal Materials Horizons.
Scientists from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Osaka University introduced a method for manufacturing complex microrobots driven by chemical energy using in situ integration. By 3D-printing and assembling the mechanical structures and actuators of microrobots inside a microfluidic chip, the resulting microrobots were able to perform desired functions, like moving or grasping. This work may help realize the vision of microsurgery performed by autonomous robots.
This little robot can go almost anywhere.
In two volatile spots in the occupied West Bank, Israel has installed robotic weapons that can fire tear gas, stun grenades and sponge-tipped bullets at Palestinian protesters.
Beneath our streets lies a maze of pipes, conduits for water, sewage, and gas. Regular inspection of these pipes for leaks or repair normally requires them to be dug up. The latter is not only onerous and expensive—with an estimated annual cost of 5.5 billion pounds in the UK alone—but causes disruption to traffic as well as a nuisance to people living nearby, not to mention damage to the environment.
Researchers at North Carolina State University have created a ring-shaped soft robot capable of crawling across surfaces when exposed to elevated temperatures or infrared light. The researchers have demonstrated that these "ringbots" are capable of pulling a small payload across the surface—in ambient air or under water, as well as passing through a gap that is narrower than its ring size.