Robohub.org
Articles
Suit up with a robot to walk AND run more easily
Wyss Institute
25 Aug 2019
By Benjamin Boettner
Between walking at a leisurely pace and running for your life, human gaits can cover a wide range of speeds. Typically, we choose the gait that allows us to consume the least amo...
Evaluating and testing unintended memorization in neural networks
BAIR Blog
14 Aug 2019
By Nicholas Carlini
It is important whenever designing new technologies to ask “how will this affect people’s privacy?” This topic is especially important with regard to machine learning, where...
Robot-ants that communicate and work together
NCCR Robotics
11 Jul 2019
A team of EPFL researchers has developed tiny 10-gram robots that are inspired by ants: they can communicate with each other, assign roles among themselves and complete complex tasks together. These r...
The RoboBee flies solo
Wyss Institute
30 Jun 2019
By Leah Burrows
In the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, on a late afternoon in August, decades of research culminated in a moment of stress as the tiny, groundbreaking Robobee made its first solo flight....
The world’s smallest autonomous racing drone
Guido de Croon
22 Jun 2019
Racing team 2018-2019: Christophe De Wagter, Guido de Croon, Shuo Li, Phillipp Dürnay, Jiahao Lin, Simon Spronk
Autonomous drone racing
Drone racing is becoming a major e-sports. Enthusiasts – ...
1000x faster data augmentation
BAIR Blog
22 Jun 2019
In this blog post we introduce Population Based Augmentation (PBA), an algorithm that quickly and efficiently learns a state-of-the-art approach to augmenting data for neural network training. PBA...
Autonomous vehicles for social good: Learning to solve congestion
BAIR Blog
22 Jun 2019
By Eugene Vinitsky
We are in the midst of an unprecedented convergence of two rapidly growing trends on our roadways: sharply increasing congestion and the deployment of au...
End-to-end deep reinforcement learning without reward engineering
BAIR Blog
03 Jun 2019
By Avi Singh
Communicating the goal of a task to another person is easy: we can use language, show them an image of the desired outcome, point them to a how-to video, or use some combination of all o...
Model-based reinforcement learning from pixels with structured latent variable models
BAIR Blog
27 May 2019
By Marvin Zhang and Sharad Vikram
Imagine a robot trying to learn how to stack blocks and push objects using visual inputs from a camera feed. In order to minimize cost and safety concerns, we want o...
Robots that learn to adapt
BAIR Blog
12 May 2019
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 almos...
Robots that learn to use improvised tools
BAIR Blog
21 Apr 2019
By Annie Xie
In many animals, tool-use skills emerge from a combination of observational learning and experimentation. For example, by watching one another, chimpanzees can learn how to use twigs to...
A ‘cookbook’ for vehicle manufacturers: Getting automated parts to talk to each other
Horizon Magazine
07 Apr 2019
by Sandrine Ceurstemont
Semi-autonomous cars are expected to hit the roads in Europe next year with truck convoys following a few years later. But before different brands can share the roads, vehicle...
Manipulation by feel
BAIR Blog
05 Apr 2019
By Frederik Ebert and Stephen Tian
Guiding our fingers while typing, enabling us to nimbly strike a matchstick, and inserting a key in a keyhole all rely on our sense of touch. It has been shown that...
Controlling false discoveries in large-scale experimentation: Challenges and solutions
BAIR Blog
19 Feb 2019
By Tijana Zrnic “Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself. - The Economist, 2013 There has been a growing concern about the validity of scientific findings. A mul...
Learning preferences by looking at the world
BAIR Blog
12 Feb 2019
By Rohin Shah and Dmitrii Krasheninnikov It would be great if we could all have household robots do our chores for us. Chores are tasks that we want done to make our houses cater more to our preferenc...
A robot recreates the walk of a fossilized animal
NCCR Robotics
25 Jan 2019
Using the fossil and fossilized footprints of a 300-million-year-old animal, scientists from EPFL and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin have identified the most likely gaits of extinct animals and desig...
From robotic companions to third thumbs, machines can change the human brain
Horizon Magazine
25 Jan 2019
By Frieda Klotz
People’s interactions with machines, from robots that throw tantrums when they lose a colour-matching game against a human opponent to the bionic limbs that could give us extra ab...
Technology and robots will shake labour policies in Asia and the world
The Conversation
25 Jan 2019
By Asit K. Biswas, University of Glasgow and Kris Hartley, The Education University of Hong Kong
In the 21st century, governments cannot ignore how changes in technology will affect employment and ...
Robots are being programmed to adapt in real time
Horizon Magazine
17 Jan 2019
By Gareth Willmer
It’s part of a field of work that is building machines that can provide real-time help using only limited data as input. Standard machine-learning algorithms often need to process...
A safe, wearable soft sensor
Wyss Institute
07 Jan 2019
By Leah Burrows
Children born prematurely often develop neuromotor and cognitive developmental disabilities. The best way to reduce the impacts of those disabilities is to catch them early through a ...
How robots are helping doctors save lives in the Canadian North
The Conversation
07 Jan 2019
Ivar Mendez, University of Saskatchewan
It is the middle of the winter and a six-month-old child is brought with acute respiratory distress to a nursing station in a remote community in the Canadia...
Robots with sticky feet can climb up, down, and all around
Wyss Institute
21 Dec 2018
By Lindsay Brownell
Jet engines can have up to 25,000 individual parts, making regular maintenance a tedious task that can take over a month per engine. Many components are located deep inside the ...
Growing bio-inspired shapes with a 300-robot swarm
Sabine Hauert
19 Dec 2018
Work by I. Slavkov, D. Carrillo-Zapata, N. Carranza, X. Diego, F. Jansson, J. Kaandorp, S. Hauert, J. Sharpe
Our work published today in Science Robotics describes how we grow fully self-organised ...
A new drone can change its shape to fly through a narrow gap
NCCR Robotics
16 Dec 2018
A research team from the University of Zurich and EPFL has developed a new drone that can retract its propeller arms in flight and make itself small to fit through narrow gaps and holes. This is p...
Drones and satellite imaging to make forest protection pay
Horizon Magazine
16 Dec 2018
by Steve Gillman
Every year 7 million hectares of forest are cut down, chipping away at the 485 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) stored in trees around the world, but low-cost drones and new satell...
Soft actor critic – Deep reinforcement learning with real-world robots
BAIR Blog
16 Dec 2018
By Tuomas Haarnoja, Vitchyr Pong, Kristian Hartikainen, Aurick Zhou, Murtaza Dalal, and Sergey Levine
We are announcing the release of our state-of-the-art off-policy model-free reinforcement learnin...
Visual model-based reinforcement learning as a path towards generalist robots
BAIR Blog
04 Dec 2018
By Chelsea Finn∗, Frederik Ebert∗, Sudeep Dasari, Annie Xie, Alex Lee, and Sergey Levine
With very little explicit supervision and feedback, humans are able to learn a wide range of motor skills ...
AdaSearch: A successive elimination approach to adaptive search
BAIR Blog
14 Nov 2018
By Esther Rolf∗, David Fridovich-Keil∗, and Max Simchowitz
https://youtu.be/a4SPB3VugFI
In many tasks in machine learning, it is common to want to answer questions given fixed, pre-collected...
ANYmal robot tested on offshore platform
Péter Fankhauser
04 Nov 2018
A crucial task for energy providers is the reliable and safe operation of their plants, especially when producing energy offshore. Autonomous mobile robots are able to offer comprehensive support thro...
Small flying robots able to pull objects up to 40 times their weight
NCCR Robotics
04 Nov 2018
Researchers from EPFL and Stanford have developed small drones that can land and then move objects that are 40 times their weight, with the help of powerful winches, gecko adhesives and microspines....
Drilling down on depth sensing and deep learning
BAIR Blog
24 Oct 2018
By Daniel Seita, Jeff Mahler, Mike Danielczuk, Matthew Matl, and Ken Goldberg
This post explores two independent innovations and the potential for combining them in robotics. Two years before the Ale...
Models of dinosaur movement could help us build stronger robots and buildings
Horizon Magazine
19 Oct 2018
By Sandrine Ceurstemont
From about 245 to 66 million years ago, dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Although well-preserved skeletons give us a good idea of what they looked like, the way their limbs worke...
Learning acrobatics by watching YouTube
BAIR Blog
18 Oct 2018
By Xue Bin (Jason) Peng and Angjoo Kanazawa
Whether it’s everyday tasks like washing our hands or stunning feats of acrobatic prowess, humans are able to learn an incredible array of skills by wa...
A fleet of miniature cars for experiments in cooperative driving
The deployment of connected, automated, and autonomous vehicles presents us with transformational opportunities for road transport. These opportunities reach beyond single-vehicle automation: by enabl...
Multi-joint, personalized soft exosuit breaks new ground
Wyss Institute
18 Sep 2018
By Benjamin Boettner
In the future, smart textile-based soft robotic exosuits could be worn by soldiers, fire fighters and rescue workers to help them traverse difficult terrain and arrive fresh at t...
First results of the ROSIN project: Robotics Open-Source Software for Industry
Thilo Zimmermann
18 Sep 2018
Open-Source Software for robots is a de-facto standard in academia, and its advantages can benefit industrial applications as well. The worldwide ROS-Industrial initiative has been using ROS, the Robo...
