Standing upright and walking alone are very simple but noble motions that separate humans from many other creatures. Wearable and prosthetic technologies have emerged to augment human function in locomotion and manipulation. However, advances in wearable robot technology have been especially momentous to Byoung-Wook Kim, a triplegic for 22 years following a devastating car accident.
Mechanical engineering students challenged themselves to make a robotic fish that not only swims like a real fish, but looks the part too, demonstrating the possibilities inherent to soft robotics.
Drones and crawling robots outfitted with special scanning technology could help wind blades stay in service longer, which may help lower the cost of wind energy at a time when blades are getting bigger, pricier and harder to transport, Sandia National Laboratories researchers say.
It's likely that before too long, robots will be in the home to care for older people and help them live independently. To do that, they'll need to learn how to do all the little jobs that we might be able to do without thinking. Many modern AI systems are trained to perform specific tasks by analysing thousands of annotated images of the action being performed. While these techniques are helping to solve increasingly complex problems, they still focus on very specific tasks and require lots of time and processing power to train.
Dr. Kee-hoon Kim's team at the Center for Intelligent & Interactive Robotics of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) developed a way of teaching "impedance-controlled robots" through human demonstrations using surface electromyograms (sEMG) of muscles, and succeeded in teaching a robot to trap a dropped ball like a soccer player. A surface electromyogram is an electric signal produced during muscle activation that can be picked up on the surface of the skin.
Amazon employees start their shifts passing through turnstiles and a sign reminding them what they can't bring with them as they report for work alongside robots.
In 1969, artificial-intelligence pioneer and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon proposed a new science, one that approached the study of artificial objects just as one would study natural objects.
Researchers at Swinburne have developed a collaborative robot system to automatically treat back, neck and head pain caused by soft tissue injury.
Are robot baristas the future of South Korea's vibrant coffee culture?
Billed as "one of the most exciting artists of our time", Ai-Da differs from generations of past masters in one inescapable way: she is a robot.
University of Plymouth spinout company Fieldwork Robotics has completed initial field trials of its robot raspberry harvesting system.
In a research project for the U.S. Army, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley developed an agile robot, called Salto that looks like a Star Wars Imperial walker in miniature and may be able to aid in scouting and search-and-rescue operations.
More and more processes are being automated and digitized. Self-driving delivery vehicles, such as forklifts, are finding their way into many areas—and companies are reporting potential time and cost savings. However, an interdisciplinary research team from the universities of Göttingen, Duisburg-Essen and Trier has observed that cooperation between humans and machines can work much better than just human or just robot teams alone. The results were published in the International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technologies.
The genius of evolution is rarely seen in action, so the invisible hand guiding the direction of biological systems is often taken for granted. However, by applying the principles of natural selection to research questions and designing robots to carry out these tasks, scientists are creating the world's first evolutionary machines.
Since the dawn of humankind, exploration of certain places, ranging from the depths of the oceans to the edges of the universe, has led to numerous discoveries. However, there are also several environments that need to be examined but can't be directly observed, like chemical or nuclear reactors, underground water or oil distribution pipes, space and inside of the body. The EU-funded Phoenix project has been addressing this challenge by developing a new line of technology that will offer the opportunity to get to unreachable places.