Category robotics

Combining both wheeled and legged mobility capabilities, it is designed for demanding operational scenarios, driving intelligent upgrades across various applications including industrial inspection and emergency rescue operations.

Claire chatted to Nick Thompson from BOW about software that makes robots easier to program.

Nick Thompson is CEO of BOW and exited founder of One Beyond Ltd, an international software development firm. His career started in 1997 as a software engineer, founded One Beyond in the early 2000’s and after 20 years in the business sold to a private equity firm. In 2022 he was recognised as one of the UK’s ‘Most Ambitious Business Leaders’ by LDC Private Equity Group.

A team of roboticists and AI specialists at the Robotics & Artificial Intelligence Lab in Korea has designed, built and successfully tested a four-legged robot that is capable of conducting high-speed parkour maneuvers. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes how they gave their robot a controller capable of both planning and tracking its own movements to allow it to freely traverse a range of environments.

Frameworks are a critical, if underappreciated, component of any space exploration mission. They can range from the overall mission architecture, capturing scientific and technical goals, to the structure of messages sent between two internal components of the system.

A small team of roboticists at Robotic Systems Lab, ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, has designed, built and tested a four-legged robot capable of playing badminton with human players.

An ultra-light robotic prosthetic hand has been developed that enables both precision fingertip control and shape-adaptive gripping through simple motion commands. The hand features an innovative mechanism that allows two degrees of freedom in the thumb (adduction/abduction and flexion/extension) to be independently controlled by a single actuator, achieving exceptional user convenience and weight reduction.

In this case study, we focus on the autonomous mobile robot (AMR), which can navigate and perform tasks in active environments without direct human control. Safe navigation and obstacle avoidance are fundamentally important for AMRs in the workplace.

Interactive robots should not just be passive companions, but active partners—like therapy horses who respond to human emotion—say University of Bristol researchers.

The AAMAS 2025 best paper and demo awards were presented at the 24th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, which took place from 19-23 May 2025 in Detroit. The Distinguished Dissertation Award was also recently announced. The winners in the various categories are as follows:

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Best Paper Award

Winner

• Soft Condorcet Optimization for Ranking of General Agents, Marc Lanctot, Kate Larson, Michael Kaisers, Quentin Berthet, Ian Gemp, Manfred Diaz, Roberto-Rafael Maura-Rivero, Yoram Bachrach, Anna Koop, Doina Precup

Finalists

• Azorus: Commitments over Protocols for BDI Agents, Amit K. Chopra, Matteo Baldoni, Samuel H. Christie V, Munindar P. Singh
• Curiosity-Driven Partner Selection Accelerates Convention Emergence in Language Games, Chin-Wing Leung, Paolo Turrini, Ann Nowe
• Reinforcement Learning-based Approach for Vehicle-to-Building Charging with Heterogeneous Agents and Long Term Rewards, Fangqi Liu, Rishav Sen, Jose Paolo Talusan, Ava Pettet, Aaron Kandel, Yoshinori Suzue, Ayan Mukhopadhyay, Abhishek Dubey
• Ready, Bid, Go! On-Demand Delivery Using Fleets of Drones with Unknown, Heterogeneous Energy Storage Constraints, Mohamed S. Talamali, Genki Miyauchi, Thomas Watteyne, Micael Santos Couceiro, Roderich Gross

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Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper Award

Winners

• Decentralized Planning Using Probabilistic Hyperproperties, Francesco Pontiggia, Filip Macák, Roman Andriushchenko, Michele Chiari, Milan Ceska
• Large Language Models for Virtual Human Gesture Selection, Parisa Ghanad Torshizi, Laura B. Hensel, Ari Shapiro, Stacy Marsella

Runner-up

• ReSCOM: Reward-Shaped Curriculum for Efficient Multi-Agent Communication Learning, Xinghai Wei, Tingting Yuan, Jie Yuan, Dongxiao Liu, Xiaoming Fu

Finalists

• Explaining Facial Expression Recognition, Sanjeev Nahulanthran, Leimin Tian, Dana Kulic, Mor Vered
• Agent-Based Analysis of Green Disclosure Policies and Their Market-Wide Impact on Firm Behavior, Lingxiao Zhao, Maria Polukarov, Carmine Ventre

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Blue Sky Ideas Track Best Paper Award

Winner

• Grounding Agent Reasoning in Image Schemas: A Neurosymbolic Approach to Embodied Cognition, François Olivier, Zied Bouraoui

Finalist

• Towards Foundation-model-based multiagent system to Accelerate AI for social impact, Yunfan Zhao, Niclas Boehmer, Aparna Taneja, Milind Tambe

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Best Demo Award

Winner

• Serious Games for Ethical Preference Elicitation, Jayati Deshmukh, Zijie Liang, Vahid Yazdanpanah, Sebastian Stein, Sarvapali Ramchurn

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Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award

The Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award is given for dissertations in the field of autonomous agents and multiagent systems that show originality, depth, impact, as well as quality of writing, supported by high-quality publications.

Winner

• Jannik Peters. Thesis title: Facets of Proportionality: Selecting Committees, Budgets, and Clusters

Runner-up

• Lily Xu. Thesis title: High-stakes decisions from low-quality data: AI decision-making for planetary health

Interactive robots should not just be passive companions, but active partners -- like therapy horses who respond to human emotion -- say researchers.

Specialized robots that can both fly and drive typically touch down on land before attempting to transform and drive away. But when the landing terrain is rough, these robots sometimes get stuck and are unable to continue operating.

Engineers have developed a real-life Transformer that has the 'brains' to morph in midair, allowing the drone-like robot to smoothly roll away and begin its ground operations without pause. The increased agility and robustness of such robots could be particularly useful for commercial delivery systems and robotic explorers.

Working with robots is becoming more common in the recycling industry, helping automate tasks and making complicated work easier. But training human employees to work with robots can be difficult and time-consuming.

In the ocean sciences, robots provide views of the unexplored and can navigate environments not safely accessible to humans. Such dangerous settings make up the majority of Earth's oceans.

Scientists have created the first soft robots that can walk straight out of the machines that make them.