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Articles
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...
RoboBee powered by soft muscles
Wyss Institute
06 Nov 2019
By Leah Burrows
The sight of a RoboBee careening towards a wall or crashing into a glass box may have once triggered panic in the researchers in the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory at the Harvard Jo...
Look then listen: Pre-learning environment representations for data-efficient neural instruction following
BAIR Blog
06 Nov 2019
By David Gaddy
When learning to follow natural language instructions, neural networks tend to be very data hungry – they require a huge number of examples pairing language with actions in order to ...
A swarm of autonomous tiny flying robots
Guido de Croon
04 Nov 2019
By K.N. McGuire, C. De Wagter, K. Tuyls, H.J. Kappen, G.C.H.E. de Croon
Greenhouses, search-and-rescue teams and warehouses are all looking for new methods to enable surveillance in a manner that i...
Functional RL with Keras and Tensorflow Eager
BAIR Blog
21 Oct 2019
By Eric Liang and Richard Liaw and Clement Gehring
In this blog post, we explore a functional paradigm for implementing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. The paradigm will be that developers wr...
A soft matter computer for soft robots
Martin Garrad
03 Oct 2019
Our work published recently in Science Robotics describes a new form of computer, ideally suited to controlling soft robots. Our Soft Matter Computer (SMC) is inspired by the way information is encode...
Deep dynamics models for dexterous manipulation
BAIR Blog
03 Oct 2019
By Anusha Nagabandi
Dexterous manipulation with multi-fingered hands is a grand challenge in robotics: the versatility of the human hand is as yet unrivaled by the capabilities of robotic systems...
Complex lattices that change in response to stimuli open a range of applications in electronics, robotics, and medicine
Wyss Institute
03 Oct 2019
By Leah Burrows
What would it take to transform a flat sheet into a human face? How would the sheet need to grow and shrink to form eyes that are concave into the face and a convex nose and chin th...
Sample efficient evolutionary algorithm for analog circuit design
BAIR Blog
03 Oct 2019
By Kourosh Hakhamaneshi
In this post, we share some recent promising results regarding the applications of Deep Learning in analog IC design. While this work targets a specific application, the propo...
The DARPA SubT Challenge: A robot triathlon
Oliver Mitchell
03 Oct 2019
One of the biggest urban legends growing up in New York City were rumors about alligators living in the sewers. This myth even inspired a popular children’s book called “The Great Escape: ...
A gentle grip on gelatinous creatures
Wyss Institute
16 Sep 2019
Jellyfish are about 95% water, making them some of the most diaphanous, delicate animals on the planet. But the remaining 5% of them have yielded important scientific discoveries, like green fluoresce...
Robots can now learn to swarm on the go
University of Bristol
25 Aug 2019
A new generation of swarming robots which can independently learn and evolve new behaviours in the wild is one step closer, thanks to research from the University of Bristol and the University of the ...
A miniature stretchable pump for the next generation of soft robots
NCCR Robotics
25 Aug 2019
By Laure-Anne Pessina and Nicola Nosengo
Scientists at EPFL have developed a tiny pump that could play a big role in the development of autonomous soft robots, lightweight exoskeletons and smart clot...
