It's not always easy to make sense of the complex environmental diplomacy taking place at a UN summit billed as humanity's last hope to save nature.
Researchers at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT—Italian Institute of Technology) have recently realized a new prototype robotic platform for space applications. The new robot, called MARM, has three limbs that can be used to walk, move, grasp and transport payload modules while self-relocating itself on the space infrastructure under a microgravity environment.
A small, self-driven vehicle heads across a sidewalk to a person and stops. Then the individual reaches down, opens the hatch and gets out the food he or she ordered. This isn't a scene in a science fiction movie, rather Uber Eats' newest mode of food delivery coming for Miami-Dade residents.
A trio of researchers at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, working with a colleague at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has designed and built a working quadruped robot with magnetized feet that can climb on the walls and ceilings of metal buildings and structures.
A new gelatinous robot that crawls, powered by nothing more than temperature change and clever design, brings "a kind of intelligence" to the field of soft robotics.
Jarvis moves slowly, yet meticulously, from one station to another to make a cup of cappuccino. Jarvis makes the espresso, pours the milk, steams the foam and puts it all together, topping it off with a carefully drawn foam leaf.
Stringent security requirements mean that the inspection and maintenance of infrastructure such as tunnels, oil refineries and bridges are becoming expensive and time-consuming.
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Light-weight and flying robots the size of small insects could have highly valuable real-world applications, for instance supporting search & rescue missions, inspections of hazardous sites, and even space exploration.
Cornell University engineers have created a soft robot capable of detecting when and where it was damaged—and then healing itself on the spot.
A trio of researchers at Columbia University has developed a very simple, small, soft-bodied robot based on hair-clip technology. Zechen Xiong, Yufeng Su and Hod Lipson have written a paper available on arXiv describing the idea behind their robot design and the two robots they built.
Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute recently created OmniWheg, a robotic system that can adapt its configuration while navigating its surrounding environment, seamlessly changing from a wheeled to a legged robot. This robot, introduced in an IEEE IROS 2022 paper, pre-published on arXiv, is based on an updated version of the so-called "whegs," a series of mechanisms design to transform a robot's wheels or wings into legs.
Researchers used deep reinforcement learning to steer atoms into a lattice shape, with a view to building new materials or nanodevices.
A team of scientists at EPFL have built a new neural network system that can help understand how animals adapt their movement to changes in their own body and to create more powerful artificial intelligence systems.
A small city in the east of Czechia called Hranice harbors a unique natural wonder that is not (yet) trending on Instagram. The Hranice Abyss is the deepest underwater cave pit in the world, and a team of researchers recently beat a record by revealing more about its depth.