Robohub.org
Articles
Three very different startups vie for “Robohub Choice”
Andra Keay
12 Dec 2017
Three very different robotics startups have been battling it out over the last week to win the "Robohub Choice" award in our annual startup competition. One was social, one was medical and one was agr...
Robohub Podcast is on Patreon!
Audrow Nash
07 Dec 2017
Robohub Podcast has launched a campaign on Patreon!...
FaSTrack: Ensuring safe real-time navigation of dynamic systems
BAIR Blog
07 Dec 2017
By Sylvia Herbert, David Fridovich-Keil, and Claire Tomlin
The Problem: Fast and Safe Motion Planning Real time autonomous motion planning and navigation is hard, especially when we care about s...
The stories we tell about technology: AI Narratives
The Royal Society
07 Dec 2017
By Susannah Odell and Natasha McCarthy
Technology narratives
The nature, promise and risks of new technologies enter into our shared thinking through narrative – explicit or implicit stories about...
Vote for your favorite in Robot Launch Startup Competition!
Andra Keay
02 Dec 2017
In the lead up to the finals of the Robot Launch 2017 competition on December 14, we're having one round of public voting for your favorite startup from the Top 25. While in previous years we've had ...
Model-based reinforcement learning with neural network dynamics
BAIR Blog
01 Dec 2017
By Anusha Nagabandi and Gregory Kahn
Enabling robots to act autonomously in the real-world is difficult. Really, really difficult. Even with expensive robots and teams of world-class researchers, rob...
The advantage of four legs
Oliver Mitchell
23 Nov 2017
Shortly after SoftBank acquired his company last October, Marc Raibert of Boston Dynamics confessed, “I happen to believe that robotics will be bigger than the Internet.” Many sociologist...
DART: Noise injection for robust imitation learning
BAIR Blog
22 Nov 2017
By Michael Laskey, Jonathan Lee, and Ken Goldberg
In Imitation Learning (IL), also known as Learning from Demonstration (LfD), a robot learns a control policy from analyzing demonstrations of the p...
ANDROIDS through the eye of a 19th century wooden camera
Wanda Tuerlinckx and Erwin R. Boer
19 Nov 2017
Wanda Tuerlinckx and Erwin R. Boer have fused their scientific and photographic interests in robots and traveled the world since 2016 to visit roboticists to discuss and photograph their creations. Th...
Efficient data acquisition in MATLAB: Streaming HD video in real-time
Florian Enner
16 Nov 2017
The acquisition and processing of a video stream can be very computationally expensive. Typical image processing applications split the work across multiple threads, one acquiring the images, and anot...
The race to own the autonomous super highway: Digging deeper into Broadcom’s offer to buy Qualcomm
Oliver Mitchell
14 Nov 2017
Governor Andrew Cuomo of the State of New York declared last month that New York City will join 13 other states in testing self-driving cars: “Autonomous vehicles have the potential to save time an...
Smart soft robotics for stroke rehabilitation
Adam Stokes
09 Nov 2017
The culmination of work by Alistair C. McConnell (lead-researcher) through his PhD and the SOPHIA team, the Soft Orthotic Physiotherapy Hand Interactive Aid (SOPHIA) forms the foundation for our futur...
How will robots and AI change our way of life in 2030?
Andra Keay
09 Nov 2017
At #WebSummit 2017, I was part of a panel on what the future will bring in 2030 with John Vickers from Blue Abyss, Jacques Van den Broek from Randstad and Stewart Rogers from Venture Beat. John talked...
Robust distributed decision-making in robot swarms
Michael Crosscombe
06 Nov 2017
Reaching an optimal shared decision in a distributed way is a key aspect of many multi-agent and swarm robotic applications....
1000 local events expected during the European Robotics Week 2017
SPARC
06 Nov 2017
The importance of robotics for Europe's regions will be the focus of a week-long celebration of robotics taking place around Europe on 17–27 November 2017. The European Robotics Week 2017 (ERW2017) ...
Congress’ automated driving bills are both more and less than they seem
Bryant Walker Smith
27 Oct 2017
Bills being considered by Congress deserve our attention—but not our full attention. To wit: When it comes to safety-related regulation of automated driving, existing law is at least as important as...
New RoboBee flies, dives, swims, and explodes out the of water
Wyss Institute
27 Oct 2017
By Leah Burrows
We’ve seen RoboBees that can fly, stick to walls, and dive into water. Now, get ready for a hybrid RoboBee that can fly, dive into water, swim, propel itself back out of water, and ...
Shaping animal, vegetable and mineral
Wyss Institute
19 Oct 2017
By Leah Burrows
Nature has a way of making complex shapes from a set of simple growth rules. The curve of a petal, the swoop of a branch, even the contours of our face are shaped by these processes. ...
Energy, enthusiasm and spirit of cooperation: Award winners of ERL Emergency Robots 2017 announced
SPARC
29 Sep 2017
The European Robotics League (ERL) announced the winners of ERL Emergency Robots 2017 major tournament, during the awards ceremony held on Saturday, 23rd September at Giardini Pro Patria, in Piombino,...
The referees’ special awards ERL Emergency Robots 2017
SPARC
29 Sep 2017
The European Robotics League (ERL) announced the winners of ERL Emergency Robots 2017 major tournament, during the awards ceremony held on Saturday, 23rd September at Giardini Pro Patria, in Piombino,...
A language to design control algorithms for robot swarms
Lenka Pitonakova
28 Sep 2017
Designing and representing control algorithms is challenging in swarm robotics, where the collective swarm performance depends on interactions between robots and with their environment. The currently ...
#ERLEmergency2017 in tweets
SPARC
27 Sep 2017
The ERL Emergency Robots 2017 (#ERLemergency2017) major tournament in Piombino, Italy, gathered 130 participants from 16 universities and companies from 8 European countries. Participating teams desig...
EU’s future cyber-farms to utilise drones, robots and sensors
Horizon Magazine
25 Aug 2017
by Anthony King
Bee-based maths is helping teach swarms of drones to find weeds, while robotic mowers keep hedgerows in shape....
Digital symbiosis lets robot co-workers predict human behaviour
Horizon Magazine
18 Aug 2017
by Anthony King
Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk fear that the robotic revolution may already be underway, but automation isn’t going to take over just yet – first machines will work alongside us.
...
Artificial skin could allow robots to feel like we do
Horizon Magazine
02 Aug 2017
Artificial skin with post-human sensing capabilities, and a better understanding of skin tissue, could pave the way for robots that can feel, smart-transplants and even cyborgs....
Robots to the rescue!
Peter Feuilherade
19 Jul 2017
This article was first published on the IEC e-tech website.
Rapid advances in technology are revolutionizing the roles of aerial, terrestrial and maritime robotic systems in disaster relief, search...
IROS Workshop: Best practices in designing roadmaps for robotics innovation
Hallie Siegel and AJung Moon
16 Jul 2017
Join us at the 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017) for a full day workshop that will bring together international stakeholders in robotics to examine ...
The Robotarium: A remotely accessible swarm robotics research testbed
Daniel Pickem, Paul Glotfelter, Li Wang, Mark Mote, Aaron D. Ames, Eric Feron and Magnus Egerstedt
29 Jun 2017
When developing algorithms for coordinating the behaviors of swarms of robots it is crucial that the algorithms are actually deployed and tested on real hardware platforms. Unfortunately, building and...
UAV-based crop and weed classification for future farming
Crops are key for a sustainable food production and we face several challenges in crop production. First, we need to feed a growing world population. Second, our society demands high-quality foods. Th...
Spider webs as computers
Helmut Hauser
27 Jun 2017
Spiders are truly amazing creatures. They have evolved over more than 200 million years and can be found in almost every corner of our planet. They are one of the most successful animals. Not less imp...
Thought leadership in social sector robotics
Patrick Meier
20 Jun 2017
WeRobotics Global has become a premier forum for social good robotics. The feedback featured below was unsolicited. On June 1, 2017, we convened our first, annual global event, bringing together 34...
How to reduce Zika using flying robots
Patrick Meier
15 Jun 2017
Mosquitos kill more humans every year than any other animal on the planet and conventional methods to reduce mosquito-borne illnesses haven’t worked as well as many hoped. So we’ve been hard at wo...
Indoor show drones make history on Broadway
Christian Hoffmann
14 Jun 2017
Over the past year, 398 audiences of up to 2,000 people witnessed an octet of colorful lampshades perform an airborne choreography during Cirque du Soleil’s Broadway show Paramour, which ran until ...
Making Pepper walk: Understanding Softbank’s purchase of Boston Dynamics
Oliver Mitchell
12 Jun 2017
It is unclear if Masayoshi Son, Chairman of Softbank, was one of the 17 million YouTube viewers of Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog before acquiring the company for an undisclosed amount this past Thursday...
From member to mentor: Life after being a FIRST student
Molly Urbina
12 Jun 2017
3! 2! 1! Go! Suddenly, robots jerk into motion and zoom across the field to score points, crossing over several types of terrain and shooting balls into high and low goals. Another buzzer sounds, driv...
Mori: A modular origami robot
NCCR Robotics
08 Jun 2017
The fields of modular and origami robotics have become increasingly popular in recent years, with both approaches presenting particular benefits, as well as limitations, to the end user. Christoph Bel...
