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Articles
Face masks that can diagnose COVID-19
Wyss Institute
29 Jun 2021
By Lindsay Brownell
Most people associate the term “wearable” with a fitness tracker, smartwatch, or wireless earbuds. But what if cutting-edge biotechnology were integrated into your clothing,...
Expectations and perceptions of healthcare professionals for robot deployment in hospital environments during the COVID-19 pandemic
The recent outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome, caused by coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), also referred to as COVID-19, has spread globally in an unprecedented way. In response, the efforts ...
Slender robotic finger senses buried items
MIT News
27 May 2021
By Daniel Ackerman
Over the years, robots have gotten quite good at identifying objects — as long as they’re out in the open.
Discerning buried items in granular material like sand is a ...
Helping drone swarms avoid obstacles without hitting each other
EPFL
20 May 2021
By Clara Marc
There is strength in numbers. That’s true not only for humans, but for drones too. By flying in a swarm, they can cover larger areas and collect a wider range of data, since each dr...
A robot that senses hidden objects
MIT News
03 Apr 2021
By Daniel Ackerman | MIT News Office
In recent years, robots have gained artificial vision, touch, and even smell. “Researchers have been giving robots human-like perception,” says MIT Associa...
Towards mapping unknown environments with a robot swarm
Mapping is an essential task in many robotics applications. A map is a representation of the environment generated from robots positions and sensors data. A map can be either used to navigate the robo...
System detects errors when medication is self-administered
MIT News
19 Mar 2021
From swallowing pills to injecting insulin, patients frequently administer their own medication. But they don’t always get it right. Improper adherence to doctors’ orders is commonplace, accountin...
Maximum Entropy RL (Provably) Solves Some Robust RL Problems
BAIR Blog
15 Mar 2021
By Ben Eysenbach
Nearly all real-world applications of reinforcement learning involve some degree of shift between the training environment and the testing environment. However, prior work has obse...
Self-supervised policy adaptation during deployment
BAIR Blog
26 Feb 2021
Our method learns a task in a fixed, simulated environment and quickly adapts
to new environments (e.g. the real world) solely from online interaction during
deployment.
The ability for hum...
Soft robots for ocean exploration and offshore operations: A perspective
Simona Aracri
06 Feb 2021
Most of the ocean is unknown. Yet we know that the most challenging environments on the planet reside in it. Understanding the ocean in its totality is a key component for the sustainable development ...
Wielding a laser beam deep inside the body
Wyss Institute
04 Feb 2021
A microrobotic opto-electro-mechanical device able to steer a laser beam with high speed and a large range of motion could enhance the possibilities of minimally invasive surgeries
By Benjamin Boet...
Robotic swarm swims like a school of fish
Wyss Institute
01 Feb 2021
By Leah Burrows / SEAS Communications
Schools of fish exhibit complex, synchronized behaviors that help them find food, migrate, and evade predators. No one fish or sub-group of fish coordinates th...
Self-supervised learning of visual appearance solves fundamental problems of optical flow
Guido de Croon
19 Jan 2021
Flying insects as inspiration to AI for small drones
How do honeybees land on flowers or avoid obstacles? One would expect such questions to be mostly of interest to biologists. However, the rise o...
How to keep drones flying when a motor fails
NCCR Robotics
14 Jan 2021
Robotics researchers at the University of Zurich show how onboard cameras can be used to keep damaged quadcopters in the air and flying stably – even without GPS....
Shaping the UK’s future with smart machines: Findings from four ThinkIns with academia, industry, policy, and the public
Sabine Hauert
18 Dec 2020
The UK Robotics Growth Partnership (RGP) aims to set the conditions for success to empower the UK to be a global leader in Robotics and Autonomous Systems whilst delivering a smarter, safer, more pros...
Ultra-sensitive and resilient sensor for soft robotic systems
Wyss Institute
02 Dec 2020
By Leah Burrows / SEAS communications
Newly engineered slinky-like strain sensors for textiles and soft robotic systems survive the washing machine, cars and hammers....
Showing robots how to drive a car… in just a few easy lessons
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
27 Nov 2020
By Caitlin Dawson
USC researchers have developed a method that could allow robots to learn new tasks, like setting a table or driving a car, from observing a small number of demonstrations....
Drones that patrol forests could monitor environmental and ecological changes
Imperial College London
06 Nov 2020
By Caroline Brogan
Imperial researchers have created drones that can attach sensors to trees to monitor environmental and ecological changes in forests....
A raptor-inspired drone with morphing wing and tail
NCCR Robotics
31 Oct 2020
By Nicola Nosengo
NCCR Robotics researchers at EPFL have developed a drone with a feathered wing and tail that give it unprecedented flight agility....
RoboTED: a case study in Ethical Risk Assessment
Alan Winfield
28 Oct 2020
A few weeks ago I gave a short paper at the excellent International Conference on Robot Ethics and Standards (ICRES 2020), outlining a case study in Ethical Risk Assessment - see our paper here. Our c...
Lily the barn owl reveals how birds fly in gusty winds
University of Bristol
26 Oct 2020
Scientists from the University of Bristol and the Royal Veterinary College have discovered how birds are able to fly in gusty conditions – findings that could inform the development of bio-inspired ...
Robot swarms follow instructions to create art
Frontiers Journals & Blog
18 Oct 2020
By Conn Hastings, science writer
Controlling a swarm of robots to paint a picture sounds like a difficult task. However, a new technique allows an artist to do just that, without worrying about pro...
Plan2Explore: Active model-building for self-supervised visual reinforcement learning
BAIR Blog
06 Oct 2020
By Oleh Rybkin, Danijar Hafner and Deepak Pathak[latexpage]
To operate successfully in unstructured open-world environments, autonomous intelligent agents need to solve many different tasks and lea...
Wearable technologies to make rehab more precise
Wyss Institute
04 Oct 2020
By Tim Sullivan / Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital Communications
A group based out of the Spaulding Motion Analysis Lab at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital published “Enabling Precision Rehabi...
AWAC: Accelerating online reinforcement learning with offline datasets
BAIR Blog
30 Sep 2020
By Ashvin Nair and Abhishek Gupta
Robots trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have the potential to be used across a huge variety of challenging real world problems. To apply RL to a new problem...
Can RL from pixels be as efficient as RL from state?
BAIR Blog
16 Sep 2020
By Misha Laskin, Aravind Srinivas, Kimin Lee, Adam Stooke, Lerrel Pinto, Pieter Abbeel
A remarkable characteristic of human intelligence is our ability to learn tasks quickly. Most humans can learn...
OmniTact: a multi-directional high-resolution touch sensor
BAIR Blog
22 Jul 2020
By Akhil Padmanabha and Frederik Ebert
Touch has been shown to be important for dexterous manipulation in robotics. Recently, the GelSight sensor has caught significant interest for learning-based ...
Next-generation cockroach-inspired robot is small but mighty
Wyss Institute
24 Jun 2020
By Leah Burrows
This itsy-bitsy robot can’t climb up the waterspout yet but it can run, jump, carry heavy payloads and turn on a dime. Dubbed HAMR-JR, this microrobot developed by researchers at...
Drones learn acrobatics by themselves
NCCR Robotics
24 Jun 2020
Researchers from NCCR Robotics at the University of Zurich and Intel developed an algorithm that pushes autonomous drones to their physical limit....
Unsupervised meta-learning: learning to learn without supervision
BAIR Blog
06 May 2020
By Benjamin Eysenbach and Abhishek Gupta This post is cross-listed on the CMU ML blog. The history of machine learning has largely been a story of increasing abstraction. In the dawn of ML, research...
Robots learning to move like animals
BAIR Blog
06 Apr 2020
By Xue Bin (Jason) Peng Whether it’s a dog chasing after a ball, or a monkey swinging through the trees, animals can effortlessly perform an incredibly rich repertoire of agile locomotion skills. B...
Does on-policy data collection fix errors in off-policy reinforcement learning?
BAIR Blog
18 Mar 2020
[latexpage]
Reinforcement learning has seen a great deal of success in solving complex decision making problems ranging from robotics to games to supply chain management to recommender systems. Des...
Emergent behavior by minimizing chaos
BAIR Blog
26 Jan 2020
By Glen Berseth
All living organisms carve out environmental niches within which they can maintain relative predictability amidst the ever-increasing entropy around them (1), (2). Humans, for e...
Data-driven deep reinforcement learning
BAIR Blog
07 Dec 2019
By Aviral Kumar
One of the primary factors behind the success of machine learning approaches in open world settings, such as image recognition and natural language processing, has been the ability of...
ROBOTT-NET pilot project: Cobots for safe and cheap assembly of frequency converters
Thilo Zimmermann
07 Dec 2019
At Danfoss in Gråsten, the Danish Technological Institute (DTI) is testing, as part of a pilot project in the European robot network ROBOTT-NET, several robot technologies: Manipulation using force s...
RoboNet: A dataset for large-scale multi-robot learning
BAIR Blog
07 Dec 2019
By Sudeep Dasari
This post is cross-listed at the SAIL Blog and the CMU ML blog. In the last decade, we’ve seen learning-based systems provide transformative solutions for a wide range of percep...
