A trio of robotics engineers at Stanford University, working with colleagues from Google's Deep Mind, has built on Google's ALOHA system to create a mobile robot capable of carrying out a wide variety of household chores—they have named it Mobile ALOHA.
For drones to save lives in search and rescue missions, or even reliably deliver our packages, they need to navigate dynamic environments without accident. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have had success steering through open spaces time and time again, but the unpredictability of moving obstacles has been a challenge, especially in indoor environments with no GPS signals. Kenji Shimada and his students leaned into this problem to develop new technology that enables autonomous flights in indoor dynamic environments.
Robotic systems inspired by nature can help to efficiently tackle a wide range of problems, ranging from navigating complex environments to seamlessly completing missions as a team. In recent years, roboticists have created a growing number of bio-inspired systems designed to replicate the body structure and movements of various animals, including snakes.
Imagine a flying dragon that doesn't spout fire, but instead extinguishes it with blasts of water. Thanks to a team of Japanese researchers, this new kind of beast may soon be recruited to firefighter teams around the world, to help put out fires that are too dangerous for their human teammates to approach.
A tactile perception system capable of providing human-like multimodal tactile information to objects like robots and wearable devices that require tactile data in real-time has been developed.
Working in a greenhouse is both strenuous and time-consuming. The picking robot from ETH spin-off Floating Robotics takes on particularly repetitive tasks, thereby alleviating the strain on human pickers. It is currently undergoing testing at Beerstecher AG in Hinwil.
A team of researchers at the University of Tokyo has built a bridge between large language models and robots that promises more humanlike gestures while dispensing with traditional hardware-dependent controls.
A pair of roboticists at the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), Technical University of Munich, in Germany, has found that it is possible to give robots some degree of proprioception using machine-learning techniques. In their study reported in the journal Science Robotics, Fernando Díaz Ledezma and Sami Haddadin developed a new machine-learning approach to allow a robot to learn the specifics of its body.
Nuclear power stations could be decommissioned in the future with the help of teams of autonomous robots known as the SMuRFs, scientists have suggested.
Roboticists have been trying to develop robots that can tackle various everyday house chores, such as washing dishes or tidying up, for several years. However, so far none of the robots created has been commercialized adopted on a large scale.
Small robots are important tools for the investigation and inspection of, well, small spaces. They can carefully place their steps, allowing them to navigate around obstacles, capabilities larger robots do not always possess. This can enable them to inspect machinery or search through rubble in disaster scenarios that other robots cannot reach. However, due to their size constraints, building small robots that can steer themselves and carry their own power sources is difficult.
New machines can improve conditions for workers and boost industrial productivity.
To effectively assist humans in real-world settings, robots should be able to learn new skills and adapt their actions based on what users require them to do at different times. One way to achieve this would be to design computational approaches that allow robots to learn from human demonstrations, for instance observing videos of a person washing dishes and learning to repeat the same sequence of actions.
Alone at home, your bones creaky due to old age, you crave a cool beverage. You turn to your robot and say, "Please get me a tall glass of water from the refrigerator." Your AI-trained companion obliges. Soon, your thirst is quenched.
Neuroengineer Silvestro Micera has developed advanced technological solutions to help people regain sensory and motor functions that have been lost due to traumatic events or neurological disorders. Until now, he had never before worked on enhancing the human body and cognition with the help of technology.