Plagues of locusts, containing millions of insects, fly across the sky to attack crops, but the individual insects do not collide with each other within these massive swarms. Now a team of engineers is creating a low-power collision detector that mimics the locust avoidance response and could help robots, drones and even self-driving cars avoid collisions.
A shoddily tailored suit or a shrunken T-shirt may not be the most stylish, but wearing them is unlikely to hurt more than your reputation. An ill-fitting robotic exoskeleton on the battlefield or factory floor, however, could be a much bigger problem than a fashion faux pas.
Scientists have long envisioned building tiny robots capable of navigating environments that are inaccessible or too dangerous for humans—but finding ways to keep them powered and moving has been impossible to achieve.
Like biological fat reserves store energy in animals, a new rechargeable zinc battery integrates into the structure of a robot to provide much more energy, a team led by the University of Michigan has shown.
Humans are innately capable of performing complex movements with their hands via the articulation of their endoskeletal structure. These movements are made possible by ligaments and tendons that are elastically connected to a fairly rigid bone structure.
If you want to enhance a locust to be used as a bomb-sniffing bug, there are a few technical challenges that need solving before sending it into the field.
People rarely use just one sense to understand the world, but robots usually only rely on vision and, increasingly, touch. Carnegie Mellon University researchers find that robot perception could improve markedly by adding another sense: hearing.
A new robotic system allows medical staff to remotely operate ventilators and other bedside machines from outside intensive care rooms of patients suffering from infectious diseases.
In the future, a soldier and a game controller may be all that's needed to teach robots how to outdrive humans.
A study of children's interactions with robots was carried out at the Norwegian research fair held in every major city. It is an annual national event where children gain insight into science and what researchers do.
An armed weapons system capable of making decisions sounds like it's straight out of a Terminator movie. But once lethal autonomous weapons are out in the world, there could be no turning back.
In recent years, researchers have developed a growing amount of computational techniques to enable human-like capabilities in robots. Most techniques developed so far, however, merely focus on artificially reproducing the senses of vision and touch, disregarding other senses, such as auditory perception.
Army researchers developed a reinforcement learning approach that will allow swarms of unmanned aerial and ground vehicles to optimally accomplish various missions while minimizing performance uncertainty.
Human facial expressions could be one of the keys in building trust between Soldiers and autonomous agents.
Over the past few years, robotics researchers have designed tiny and untethered swimming robots, also known as microswimmers, with increasingly advanced sensing and locomotion capabilities. These microrobots could prove very useful in medical settings, particularly for the implementation of minimally invasive targeted therapies in parts of the body that are difficult to reach, such as the central nervous system or vascular system.