Robohub.org
Articles
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...
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...
