Researchers have proposed a new strategy for the shape assembly of robot swarms based on the idea of mean-shift exploration: When a robot is surrounded by neighboring robots and unoccupied locations, it actively gives up its current location by exploring the highest density of nearby unoccupied locations in the desired shape.
Soft robotics is the study of creating robots from soft materials, which has the advantage of flexibility and safety in human interactions. These robots are well-suited for applications ranging from medical devices to enhancing efficiency in various tasks. Additionally, using different forms of robotic movement may also serve us well in exploring the ocean or space, or doing certain jobs in those environments.
Imagine a coffee cup sitting on a table. Now, imagine a book partially obscuring the cup. As humans, we still know what the coffee cup is even though we can't see all of it. But a robot might be confused.
A study published in the Journal of Field Robotics assessed the world's first unmanned machine designed for autonomous forestry operations.
A small team of roboticists at Carnegie Mellon University has developed a training regimen that allows a robot to start out with limited abilities, such as carrying out a certain task like opening doors or drawers, and to improve as it teaches itself how to modify its techniques when faced with previously unseen challenges.
Semi-autonomous and autonomous robots are being introduced in a growing number of real-world environments, including industrial settings. Industrial robots could speed up the manufacturing of various products by assisting human workers with basic tasks and lightening their workload.
In a landmark study, Associate Professor Yoshihiro Nakata of the University of Electro-Communications, Japan, in collaboration with researchers from Osaka University, conducted research on edible robotics. Published in PLOS ONE, this study is the first to explore the experience of consuming a moving edible robot.
Inspired by the remarkable adaptability observed in biological organisms like the octopus, a breakthrough has been achieved in the field of soft robotics. A research team, led by Professor Jiyun Kim in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UNIST has successfully developed an encodable multifunctional material that can dynamically tune its shape and mechanical properties in real time.
Research involving Oregon State University has shown that a "swarm" of more than 100 autonomous ground and aerial robots can be supervised by one person without subjecting the individual to an undue workload.
A team of roboticists at New York University, working with a colleague from AI at Meta, has developed a robot that is capable of picking up designated objects in an unfamiliar room and placing them in a new designated location. In their paper posted on the arXiv preprint server, the team describes how the robot was programmed and how well it performed when tested in multiple real-word environments.
The New York City subway has pulled its controversial security robot out of service after little more than five months patrolling the busy Times Square station.
In the coming decades, NASA plans to send human crews back to the moon, build a space station in lunar orbit, establish a permanent base on the lunar surface, and—hopefully—send astronauts to Mars.
In the future, soft robots will be able to perform tasks that cannot be done by conventional robots. These soft robots could be used in terrain that is difficult to access and in environments where they are exposed to chemicals or radiation that would harm electronically controlled robots made of metal. This requires such soft robots to be controllable without any electronics, which is still a challenge in development.
Recent technological advances, such as increasingly sophisticated drones and cameras, have opened exciting new possibilities for cinematography. Most notably, film directors can now shoot scenes from a wide range of angles that were previously inaccessible and in far higher resolution.
Figure AI Inc., a startup developing humanlike robots, is in talks to raise as much as $500 million in a funding round led by Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.