Last year, nearly one third of Australian adults owned a smart speaker device allowing them to call on "Alexa" or "Siri." Now, with more time spent indoors due to COVID-19, smart voice assistants may be playing even bigger roles in people's lives.
Robots can learn how to find things faster by learning how different objects around the house are related, according to work from the University of Michigan. A new model provides robots with a visual search strategy that can teach them to look for a coffee pot nearby if they're already in sight of a refrigerator, in one of the paper's examples.
Training robots to guide injured workers through simulated tasks could make return-to-work evaluations and treatment programs more effective and accessible, according to researchers at the University of Alberta.
The two main pitfalls of robots which imitate the human body are their control and the difficulty encountered when manufacturing them in a cost-effective manner.
The latest challenge for the autonomous vehicle industry: How to assure passengers that the car they are getting in is virus free, even if it doesn't have a driver.
For the next several months, visitors to the Atlanta Botanical Garden will be able to observe the testing of a new high-tech tool in the battle to save some of the world's most endangered species. SlothBot, a slow-moving and energy-efficient robot that can linger in the trees to monitor animals, plants, and the environment below, will be tested near the Garden's popular Canopy Walk.
The next time you go to a hospital for surgery, the surgeon's assistant may be a robot.
When human contact needs to be kept to a minimum, robots can save lives and factories. But when the coronavirus crisis is over, will they amplify job losses?
Robots capable of the sophisticated motions that define advanced physical actions like walking, jumping, and navigating terrain can cost $50,000 or more, making real-world experimentation prohibitively expensive for many.
Robots capable of the sophisticated motions that define advanced physical actions like walking, jumping, and navigating terrain can cost $50,000 or more, making real-world experimentation prohibitively expensive for many.
You can now buy one of those unnerving animal-like robots you might have seen on YouTube—so long as you don't plan to use it to harm or intimidate anyone.
Animals in their natural environments effortlessly switch up their movements to hunt, escape from predators and travel with their packs every day.
A team of researchers from the University of California San Diego and the University of Science and Technology Beijing has developed a way to engineer platelets to propel themselves through biofluids as a means of delivering drugs to targeted parts of the body. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group outlines their method and how well it worked when tested in the lab. In the same issue, Jinjun Shi with Brigham and Women's Hospital has published a Focus piece outlining ongoing research into the development of natural drug delivery systems and the method used in this new effort.
Flying insects have developed effective strategies for navigating in natural environments. However, the experimental study of these strategies remains challenging due to the small size of insects and their high speed of motion: Today, it is only possible to study insects that are "tethered" or in stationary flight.
The brains of humans and other animals often practice feedforward control, as they are very good at whole-system modeling. But for machines, such modeling is computationally hard. However, researchers with Huazhong University of Science and Technology and the University of California at Berkeley have developed a new feedforward method that improves on conventional feedforward techniques.