Category Robotics Classification

The past five years have been a roller-coaster ride for the industrial robot market. A market decline in 2019 was followed by disruption in 2020, a record high in 2021, and we now see a long-term positive growth forecast.

Assistance robots are typically mobile robots designed to assist humans in malls, airports, health care facilities, home environments and various other settings. Among other things, these robots could help users to find their way around unknown environments, for instance guiding them to a specific location or sharing important information with them.

Automation and computer-aided designs are seeding the future of home gardens. With the onset of designer gardens as a service and rose-pruning robots, weekends spent toiling in the garden will be more productive and personalized.

A crewless robotic boat retracing the 1620 sea voyage of the Mayflower is set to land near Plymouth Rock.

Scientists are working on diagnostic techniques that could sniff out chemical compounds from breath, sweat, tears and other bodily emissions and that act as fingerprints of thousands of diseases.

Mobile robots are now being introduced into a wide variety of real-world settings, including public spaces, home environments, health care facilities and offices. Many of these robots are specifically designed to interact and collaborate with humans, helping them to complete hands-on physical tasks.

In the following white paper, we explore four conveyor options that fit our modular automation system, enabling you to design a full integrated conveyor system for your application.

Researchers Matthias Hofer, Michael Muehlebach and Raffaello D’Andrea have developed the one-wheel Cubli, a three-dimensional pendulum system that can balance on its pivot using a single reaction wheel. How is it possible to stabilize the two tilt angles of the system with only a single reaction wheel?

The key is to design the system such that the inertia in one direction is higher than in the other direction by attaching two masses far away from the center. As a consequence, the system moves faster in the direction with the lower inertia and slower in the direction with the higher inertia. The controller can leverage this property and stabilize both directions simultaneously.

This work was carried out at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

Almost a decade has passed since the first Cubli

The Cubli robot started with a simple idea: Can we build a 15cm sided cube that can jump up, balance on its corner, and walk across our desk using off-the-shelf motors, batteries, and electronic components? The educational article Cubli – A cube that can jump up, balance, and walk across your desk shows all the design principles and prototypes that led to the development of the robot.

In a step toward robots that can learn on the fly like humans do, a new approach expands training data sets for robots that work with soft objects like ropes and fabrics, or in cluttered environments.

Self-driving big rigs will be soon hauling Wayfair furniture down Interstate 45 through a new partnership of Waymo and J.B. Hunt Transport Services.

Like most manual and fabrication processes in the digital age, welding has been enhanced and improved by technological concepts such as automation in recent times.

For humans, finding a lost wallet buried under a pile of items is pretty straightforward—we simply remove things from the pile until we find the wallet. But for a robot, this task involves complex reasoning about the pile and objects in it, which presents a steep challenge.

The space station is a bridgehead for human space exploration missions. During its construction, operation, and maintenance, there are a variety of tasks that need to be performed. However, the space environment has harsh conditions such as microgravity, high vacuum, strong radiation, and large temperature differences, which seriously threaten the health and life safety of astronauts.

A team of researchers at the University of Zurich, has developed a highly agile quadrotor drone that is able to avoid obstacles and carry out trajectory tracking. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes how they designed their drone, what they put into it and how well it worked when tested.

In modern systems, "pick-and-place" is performed by automated grippers. They must be able to operate both powerfully and delicately and do so precisely and reliably millions of times over. Increasingly, the necessary power comes from electric motors.