Days after Meagan Brazil-Sheehan's 6-year-old son was diagnosed with leukemia, they were walking down the halls of UMass Memorial Children's Medical Center when they ran into Robin the Robot.
Developments in autonomous robotics have the potential to revolutionize manufacturing processes, making them more flexible, customizable, and efficient. But coordinating fleets of autonomous, mobile robots in a shared space—and helping them work with each other and with human partners—is an extremely complicated task.
Monash University researchers have trialed a new system demonstrating how humans and robots can team up on the job to make construction faster, safer and less physically demanding.
Marine litter is a major environmental problem around the world. As part of the EU project SEACLEAR, a research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now developed an autonomous diving robot that can detect and retrieve litter. It uses an AI system to analyze objects with ultrasound and cameras, picks them up and brings them to the surface. The autonomous underwater waste collection system demonstrated its capabilities for the first time in the port of Marseille in France.
The body movements performed by humans and other animals are known to be supported by several intricate biological and neural mechanisms. While roboticists have been trying to develop systems that emulate these mechanisms for decades, the processes driving these systems' motions remain very different.
Training humanoid robots to hike could accelerate development of embodied AI for tasks like autonomous search and rescue, ecological monitoring in unexplored places and more, say University of Michigan researchers who developed an AI model that equips humanoids to hit the trails.
Until now, when scientists created magnetic robots, their magnetization profiles were generally fixed, enabling only a specific type of shape programming capability using applied external magnetic fields. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) have now proposed a new magnetization reprogramming method that can drastically expand the complexity and diversity of the shape-programming capabilities of such robots.
People who care informally for sick or disabled friends and relatives often become invisible in their own lives. Focusing on the needs of those they care for, they rarely get the chance to talk about their own emotions or challenges, and this can lead to them feeling increasingly stressed and isolated.
For 20 hours a day, seven days a week, a security robot rolls around the old Kansas City Star building on the 1600 block of McGee Street, like the 21st century version of a street patrolling beat cop.
Growing up, we learn to push just hard enough to move a box and to avoid touching a hot pan with our bare hands. Now, a robot hand has been developed that also has these instincts.
Social companion robots are no longer just science fiction. In classrooms, libraries and homes, these small machines are designed to read stories, play games or offer comfort to children. They promise to support learning and companionship, yet their role in family life often extends beyond their original purpose.
Researchers from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa (Italy) and Brown University in Providence (U.S.) have discovered that people sense the hand of a humanoid robot as part of their body schema, particularly when it comes to carrying out a task together, like slicing a bar of soap.
Exoskeletons typically work by implementing motions programmed in advance and having the user call for them, making it difficult to use them for a wide range of motions in real-life environments.
Birds flock in order to forage and move more efficiently. Fish school to avoid predators. And bees swarm to reproduce. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have sought to mimic these natural behaviors as a way to potentially improve search-and-rescue operations or to identify areas of wildfire spread over vast areas—largely through coordinated drone or robotic movements. However, developing a means to control and utilize this type of AI—or "swarm intelligence"—has proved challenging.
A team of scientists from China and the U.S. is pioneering the development of bubble-powered robots, which could one day replace needles for painless drug delivery into the body. Inspired by nature, the researchers developed a new technique that harnesses the energy released by a collapsing bubble in a liquid, a process known as cavitation.