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An electronic skin which can learn from feeling "pain" could help create a new generation of smart robots with human-like sensitivity.

The robots are here. An eagle-sized quadcopter flew above a wooded Schuylkill river bank, counting trees as it was designed to do in the forests of the Andes.

Roboticists worldwide have recently been developing a wide range of sophisticated robotic systems designed to operate and complete missions in different environments. Some of these systems were presented at conferences, events or competitions.

Prof. Chen Tao's team at the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has proposed strain-perception-strengthening (SPS) enabled biomimetic soft skin, which realizes the dynamic transformation from tactile to pain perception. The study was published in Advanced Functional Materials.

Blood processing is largely manual.

A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, has designed and built a tiny millipede-like robot that can climb around in the gut to deliver therapeutic drugs. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes the inspiration for the robot, how it was built and how well it worked when tested on animal tissue.

In industry, people work with robots. While this can accelerate productivity, it does come with health and safety risks. As a result, some robots must be kept separate from human workers. This comes at a heavy financial cost and negatively affects human-robot interactions. If there were sensors on robots to detect a person, then these issues could be solved, but current sensors rely on impractical, rigid, and thick electronics. TU/e researchers have designed a way to make flexible, thin, and accurate sensor electronics that outperform many current sensors. The new breakthrough is published in the Nature Electronics.

The shape memory polymers known as liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are increasingly popular for uses in soft robotics, haptics, and wearable computing. Functioning as actuators, they can allow materials to contract, expand, change shape, and perform like biological muscles do.

MIT researchers have created an interactive design pipeline that streamlines and simplifies the process of crafting a customized robotic hand with tactile sensors.

Northwestern University engineers have developed the smallest-ever remote-controlled walking robot—and it comes in the form of a tiny, adorable peekytoe crab.

Hacked bank and Twitter accounts, malicious power outages and attempts to tamper with medical records threaten the security of the nation's health, money, energy, society and infrastructure. Harnessing the laws of nature—namely quantum physics—a cutting-edge teleportation technology is taking cybersecurity to new, "unhackable" heights using miniscule particles of light, or "beams."

In forests where the foliage is thick, it can be challenging to detect and track moving targets, such as people and animals, using the current technology for collecting aerial images and videos. Researchers have developed a drone-operated 1D camera array that uses airborne optical sectioning to detect and track moving people in a dense forest. This new technique can be a helpful addition to the technology used in search and rescue missions.

As robots increasingly join people on the factory floor, in warehouses and elsewhere on the job, dividing up who will do which tasks grows in complexity and importance. People are better suited for some tasks, robots for others. And in some cases, it is advantageous to spend time teaching a robot to do a task now and reap the benefits later.

Robots are gradually being introduced in a wide range of real-world settings, including malls, manufacturing facilities, and healthcare facilities. A way in which robots could be particularly useful is in assisting seniors in both their homes and elderly care facilities.

Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Pennsylvania have developed soft robots that are capable of navigating complex environments, such as mazes, without input from humans or computer software.