Image: Chelsea Turner
By Rob Matheson
With aims of bringing more human-like reasoning to autonomous vehicles, MIT researchers have created a system that uses only simple maps and visual data to enable driverless cars to navigate routes in new, complex environments.
The IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) is being held this week in Montreal, Canada. It’s one of the top venues for roboticists and attracts over 4000 conference goers.
Returning from vacation, my inbox overflowed with emails announcing robot “firsts.” At the same time, my relaxed post-vacation disposition was quickly rocked by the news of the day and recent discussions regarding the extent of AI bias within New York’s financial system. These unrelated incidents are very much connected in representing the paradox of the acceleration of today’s inventions.
Halodi Robotics
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Bernt Børnich, CEO, CTO, and Co-founder of Halodi Robotics, about Eve (EVEr3), a general purpose full-size humanoid robot, capable of a wide variety of tasks. Børnich discusses how Eve can be used in research, how Eve’s motors have been designed to be safe around humans (including why they use a low gear ratio), how they do direct force control and the benefits of this approach, and how they use machine learning to reduce cogging in their motors. Børnich also discusses the longterm goal of Halodi Robotics and how they plan to support researchers using Eve.
By Edmund Hunt, University of Bristol
From flocks of birds to fish schools in the sea, or towering termite mounds, many social groups in nature exist together to survive and thrive. This cooperative behaviour can be used by engineers as “bio-inspiration” to solve practical human problems, and by computer scientists studying swarm intelligence.
This blogpost is an updated round up of the various sets of ethical principles of robotics and AI that have been proposed to date, ordered by date of first publication.
By Anusha Nagabandi and Ignasi Clavera
Humans have the ability to seamlessly adapt to changes in their environments: adults can learn to walk on crutches in just a few seconds, people can adapt almost instantaneously to picking up an object that is unexpectedly heavy, and children who can walk on flat ground can quickly adapt their gait to walk uphill without having to relearn how to walk. This adaptation is critical for functioning in the real world.
Hydraulics are sometimes looked at as an alternative to electric motors.
Image: MIT News Office
By Rob Matheson
MIT researchers have devised a method for assessing how robust machine-learning models known as neural networks are for various tasks, by detecting when the models make mistakes they shouldn’t.
In this episode, Lauren Klein interviews Hae Won Park, a Research Scientist in the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, about storytelling robots for children. Dr. Park elaborates on enabling robots to understand how children are learning, and how they can help children with literacy skills and encourage exploration.
By Adrienne Mayor
As early as Homer, more than 2,500 years ago, Greek mythology explored the idea of automatons and self-moving devices. By the third century B.C., engineers in Hellenistic Alexandria, in Egypt, were building real mechanical robots and machines. And such science fictions and historical technologies were not unique to Greco-Roman culture.
By Benjamin Boettner
Along developed riverbanks, physical barriers can help contain flooding and combat erosion. In arid regions, check dams can help retain soil after rainfall and restore damaged landscapes. In construction projects, metal plates can provide support for excavations, retaining walls on slopes, or permanent foundations. All of these applications can be addressed with the use of sheet piles, elements folded from flat material and driven vertically into the ground to form walls and stabilize soil.
Image courtesy of the researchers.
By Anne Trafton
MIT engineers have designed tiny robots that can help drug-delivery nanoparticles push their way out of the bloodstream and into a tumor or another disease site. Like crafts in “Fantastic Voyage” — a 1960s science fiction film in which a submarine crew shrinks in size and roams a body to repair damaged cells — the robots swim through the bloodstream, creating a current that drags nanoparticles along with them.
by Julianna Photopoulos
Next-generation wheelchairs could incorporate brain-controlled robotic arms and rentable add-on motors in order to help people with disabilities more easily carry out daily tasks or get around a city.
