Tag news

What factors influence the embodiment felt towards parts of our bodies controlled by others? Using a new "joint avatar" whose left and right limbs are controlled by two people simultaneously, researchers have revealed that the visual information necessary to predict the partner's intentions behind limb movements can significantly enhance the sense of embodiment towards partner-controlled limbs during virtual co-embodiment. This finding may contribute to enhancing the sense of embodiment towards autonomous prosthetic limbs.

Researchers at Ulm University in Germany have recently developed a new framework that could help to make self-driving cars safer in urban and highly dynamic environments. This framework, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, is designed to identify potential threats around the vehicle in real-time.

Today’s integrated power modules are addressing the demanding size, weight, power budgets and cost efficiencies required to move robots from factory, residential and commercial applications into a vast new landscape bounded only by the imagination.

A chess-playing robot grabbed the finger of its 7-year-old opponent and broke it during last week's Moscow Chess Open tournament, Russian media reported Monday.

AGV’s and AMR’s address a number of key manufacturing process and facility-related concerns as well as key cost-related metrics in the migration towards continuous improvement philosophies such as lean manufacturing and six sigma.

Teams of mobile robots could be highly effective in helping humans to complete straining manual tasks, such as manufacturing processes or the transportation of heavy objects. In recent years, some of these robots have already been tested and introduced in real-world settings, attaining very promising results.

Dr. Akira Kakugo and his team from Hokkaido University in Japan sent us a video presentation of his recent paper ‘Cooperative cargo transportation by a swarm of molecular machines’, published in Science Robotics.

‘Despite the advancements in macro-scale robots, the development of a large number of small-size robots is still challenging, which is crucial to enhance the scalability of swarm robots,’ says Dr. Kakugo. In the paper, researchers showed it is possible to collectively transport molecular cargo by a swarm of artificial molecular robots (engineered systems with biological/molecular sensors, processors and actuators) responding to light.

• PAPER – Cooperative cargo transportation by a swarm of molecular machines. M. Akter, J. J. Keya, K. Kayano, A. M. R. Kabir, D. Inoue, H. Hess, K. Sada, A. Kuzuya, H. Asanuma, and A. Kakugo. Science Robotics, 7(65), p.eabm0677.

How do people communicate when they are underwater? With body language, of course.

Marine environments present a unique set of challenges that render several technologies that were developed for land applications completely useless. Communicating using sound, or at least as people use sound to communicate, is one of them.

Michael Fulton tackles this challenge with his presentation at ICRA 2022 by using body language to communicate with an AUV underwater. Tune in for more.

His poster can be viewed here.

Michael Fulton

Michael Fulton is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. His research focuses primarily on underwater robotics with a focus on applications where robots work with humans. Specifically, human-robot interaction and robot perception using computer vision and deep learning, with the intent of creating systems that can work collaboratively with humans in challenging environments.

Simulation models show that this new mode of transport could have huge cost advantages, with savings between 20 and 50 per cent compared to traditional multi-tiered land transport systems.

When we announced AlphaFold 2 last December, it was hailed as a solution to the 50-year old protein folding problem. Last week, we published the scientific paper and source code explaining how we created this highly innovative system, and today we’re sharing high-quality predictions for the shape of every single protein in the human body, as well as for the proteins of 20 additional organisms that scientists rely on for their research.

When we announced AlphaFold 2 last December, it was hailed as a solution to the 50-year old protein folding problem. Last week, we published the scientific paper and source code explaining how we created this highly innovative system, and today we’re sharing high-quality predictions for the shape of every single protein in the human body, as well as for the proteins of 20 additional organisms that scientists rely on for their research.

As the underwater robot OceanOneK carefully navigated toward the upper deck railing of the sunken Italian steamship Le Francesco Crispi about 500 m below the Mediterranean's surface this month (roughly a third of a mile), Stanford University roboticist Oussama Khatib felt as though he himself was there.

The traditional portfolio mix of heavy hardware-orientation with associated software is transitioning to application and non-control software. The move to solutions combining hardware, software, and services is real.

The robot watched as Shikhar Bahl opened the refrigerator door. It recorded his movements, the swing of the door, the location of the fridge and more, analyzing this data and readying itself to mimic what Bahl had done.

When communication lines are open, individual agents such as robots or drones can work together to collaborate and complete a task. But what if they aren't equipped with the right hardware or the signals are blocked, making communication impossible? University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers started with this more difficult challenge. They developed a method to train multiple agents to work together using multi-agent reinforcement learning, a type of artificial intelligence.