Robots with wheels could potentially navigate a variety of indoor and outdoor environments, traveling for longer distances and with fewer risks of losing balance. While some wheeled robots have achieved very promising results in recent years, most of them are unable to reliably overcome steps (i.e., surfaces that are raised above ground level).
A robot is chatting to an elderly British man in his bedroom. The robot has a cheery demeanor and a pleasantly high-pitched voice.
Talking to a robot often feels stilted or delayed, thanks to computer software trying to keep up with the conversation. However, new research from the University of Waterloo has improved the ability for humans to communicate naturally with humanoid robots.
A team of biomedical, mechanical, and aerospace engineers from City University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has developed a hopping robot by attaching a spring-loaded telescopic leg to the underside of a quadcopter. Their paper is published in the journal Science Robotics.
A team of AI specialists at Google's DeepMind has used machine learning to teach tiny robots to play soccer. They describe the process for developing the robots in Science Robotics.
Smaller batch sizes instead of mass production, more complex production lines, increasing competitive pressure, unstable supply chains: Against this background, the Franco-German research project GreenBotAI addresses robotics.
An interdisciplinary research team from the University of Waterloo's Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Lab (SIRRL) has found that people prefer interacting with robots they perceive to have social identities like their own.
New chemistries for batteries, semiconductors and more could be easier to manufacture, thanks to a new approach to making chemically complex materials that researchers at the University of Michigan and Samsung's Advanced Materials Lab have demonstrated.
Researchers at Meta AI, Stanford University, Technische, Universität Dresden and the German Cancer Research Center (DFKZ) recently developed DIGIT Pinki, a miniature-sized sensor that can detect tactile information. This sensor, presented in a paper posted to the preprint server arXiv, could be integrated in new medical technologies and robotic systems.
Our muscles are nature's perfect actuators—devices that turn energy into motion. For their size, muscle fibers are more powerful and precise than most synthetic actuators. They can even heal from damage and grow stronger with exercise.
With rapid developments in artificial intelligence and robot technology, social robots will increasingly be used in society. Robotics researcher Chinmaya Mishra looked at the importance of gaze direction and human emotions in our communication with robots and developed two systems to make robots' faces work in our favor. Mishra will receive his Ph.D. at Radboud University on 17 April.
Climbing robots could have many valuable real-world applications, ranging from the completion of maintenance tasks on roofs or other tall structures to the delivery of parcels or survival kits in locations that are difficult to access. To be successfully deployed in real-world settings, however, these robots should be able to effectively sense and map their surroundings, while also accurately predicting where they are located within mapped environments.
The effective operation of robots from a distance, also known as teleoperation, could allow humans to complete a vast range of manual tasks remotely, including risky and complex procedures. Yet teleoperation could also be used to compile datasets of human motions, which could help to train humanoid robots on new tasks.
Elon Musk revealed Friday that Tesla will pull back the curtain on a robotaxi this summer, news that comes as the adoption of self-driving vehicles hits speed bumps over safety concerns.
Robotic systems have so far been primarily deployed in warehouses, airports, malls, offices, and other indoor environments, where they assist humans with basic manual tasks or answer simple queries. In the future, however, they could also be deployed in unknown and unmapped environments, where obstacles can easily occlude their sensors, increasing the risk of collisions.