Next-generation wheelchairs could incorporate brain-controlled robotic arms and rentable add-on motors in order to help people with disabilities more easily carry out daily tasks or get around a city.
Japan's ambassador to the United Nations-backed Conference on Disarmament says his country has not developed fully autonomous weapons systems and has no plans to do so.
Robots will take over all jobs, so it is often thought. On the contrary, say Charissa Freese and Ton Wilthagen: robots will create jobs. It's just that these new jobs will be different, and the challenge is to anticipate which jobs will disappear, which ones will change, and what the new ones will be like – and when. Tilburg University aims to prepare employers and employees to the labor market of the near future.
Unlike conventional robot arms with hinged and swivel joints, new flexible arms being developed by Professor Stefan Seelecke and his research group at Saarland University are constructed using muscles made from shape-memory wires that have the ability to bend in almost any direction and to wind themselves around corners.
Every time University of Pennsylvania engineer Marc Miskin speaks about his research on miniature robots, someone asks the question: How does it compare to the submarine in "Fantastic Voyage"?
Tokyo Olympic organisers on Friday rolled out a pair of chatty robots they will put to work to assist wheelchair users at the 2020 Games as they continue to plug Japan's cutting-edge technology.
It's not whether you win or lose; it's how hard the robot is working.
Researchers in China have designed an improved energy-aware and self-adaptive deployment method for autonomous underwater vehicles. The team of Chunlai Peng and Tao Wang of the Guangdong University of Technology, in Guangzhou, provide details in the International Journal of Modelling, Identification and Control.
It seems not a day goes by without the appearance of another dire warning about the future of work.
Phytoplankton form the base of the marine food chain but are notoriously difficult for scientists to account for—a little like trying to identify and count motes of dust in the air. A truly independent underwater vehicle shows it can do the job.
With an anticipated 39.5 million domestic/household robots expected to be in our homes by 2021 (IFR, 2018), Cranfield University is calling for members of the public to comment on a survey launched to identify people's views on robot ethics.
With its low ceiling draped in soft, green netting, Jianguo Zhao's lab at the Colorado State University Powerhouse Energy Campus is hard to miss. Watch the lab's walking, grasping, flying, perching, shape-shifting robots in motion, and the reason for the netting becomes all too clear.
Imagine there's a flock of aerial robots searching for a lost hiker. They have to cover a large area of remote bush and a central commander won't work because they're so spread out.
In a world first, Swinburne's Repairbot project has achieved a major milestone, using a robot to successfully 3-D print a replacement lug on an automotive headlamp assembly.
When workers in Germany call in sick, back pain is often to blame. It frequently affects employees in logistics, manufacturing and services where physically strenuous patterns of movement are part of the daily job routine. In a bid to prevent back problems, Fraunhofer researchers have come up with ErgoJack to offer a smart soft orthosis that supports workers with real-time motion detection. A prototype of this smart vest will be presented live at Hannover Messe from April 1 through 5, 2019, at Booth C24 in Hall 17.