How can humans instantly estimate the slipperiness of a surface and adjust their grip, for instance, when picking up a wet glass? Researchers from Delft University of Technology have, together with French and Australian colleagues, demonstrated that a (radial) strain of the skin of the fingertip is involved in the perception of slipperiness during initial contact. Robotics could use this information, for instance to improve prosthetics and grippers. The results have been been published in PNAS.
Inspired by how birds land and perch on branches, a team of engineers at Stanford University has built robotic graspers that can fit on drones, enabling them to catch objects and grip various surfaces.
Over the next few decades, robots could be introduced into human environments, including homes, offices and retail spaces. Among other things, robotic systems could be used to tidy up spaces and make them safer for humans.
Afloating, robotic film designed at UC Riverside could be trained to hoover oil spills at sea or remove contaminants from drinking water.
Impressions of a robot's personality can be influenced by the way it looks, sounds and feels. But now, researchers from Japan have found specific causal relationships between impressions of robot personality and body texture.
A new strategy to reduce the spread of COVID-19 employs a mobile robot that detects people in crowds who are not observing social-distancing rules, navigates to them, and encourages them to move apart. Adarsh Jagan Sathyamoorthy of the University of Maryland, College Park, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on December 1, 2021.
Like snowflakes, no two branches are alike. They can differ in size, shape and texture; some might be wet or moss-covered or bursting with offshoots. And yet birds can land on just about any of them. This ability was of great interest to the labs of Stanford University engineers Mark Cutkosky and David Lentink—now at University of Groningen in the Netherlands—which have both developed technologies inspired by animal abilities.
As robots become increasingly advanced and affordable, more people could start introducing them into their homes. Many roboticists have thus been trying to develop systems that can effectively assist humans with house chores, such as cooking, cleaning and tidying up.
To persist, life must reproduce. Over billions of years, organisms have evolved many ways of replicating, from budding plants to sexual animals to invading viruses.
When humans look at a scene, they see objects and the relationships between them. On top of your desk, there might be a laptop that is sitting to the left of a phone, which is in front of a computer monitor.
Eureka Robotics, a tech spin-off from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), has developed a technology, called Dynamis, that makes industrial robots nimbler and almost as sensitive as human hands, able to manipulate tiny glass lenses, electronics components, or engine gears that are just millimeters in size without damaging them.
It looks like a normal car but the white taxi by the kerb has nobody driving it, and communicates with customers digitally to obtain directions and take payment.
RoboCup, originally named the J-League, is an annual robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) competition organized by the International RoboCup Federation. During RoboCup, robots compete with other robots soccer tournaments.
Seoul has started trialling pint-sized robots as teaching aids in kindergartens—a pilot project the city government said would help prepare the next generation for a hi-tech future.
In the mid-1990s, there was research going on at Stanford University that would change the way we think about computers. The Media Equation experiments were simple: participants were asked to interact with a computer that acted socially for a few minutes after which, they were asked to give feedback about the interaction.