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Robot stomachs: powering machines with garbage and pee
Oliver Mitchell
14 May 2021
The Seinfeld idiom, “worlds are colliding,” is probably the best description of work in the age of Corona. Pre-pandemic, it was easy to departmentalize one’s professional life from o...
Foldable, organic and easily broken down: Why DNA is the material of choice for nanorobots
Horizon Magazine
11 May 2021
By Anthony King
Doctors know that we need smarter medicines to target the bad guys only. One hope is that tiny robots on the scale of a billionth of a metre can come to the rescue, delivering drugs...
Fish-inspired soft robot survives a trip to the deepest part of the ocean
Dimitris Tsakiris
05 May 2021
The deepest regions of the oceans still remain one of the least explored areas on Earth, despite their considerable scientific interest and the richness of lifeforms inhabiting them.
Two reasons f...
DNA-inspired ‘supercoiling’ fibres could make powerful artificial muscles for robots
Geoff Spinks
03 May 2021
ShutterstockThe double helix of DNA is one of the most iconic symbols in science. By imitating the structure of this complex genetic molecule we have found a way to make artificial muscle fibres far m...
Q&A: Vivienne Sze on crossing the hardware-software divide for efficient artificial intelligence
MIT News
02 May 2021
Not so long ago, watching a movie on a smartphone seemed impossible. Vivienne Sze was a graduate student at MIT at the time, in the mid 2000s, and she was drawn to the challenge of compressing video t...
Moon exploration rovers from Lunar Zebro
Fay de Grefte
28 Apr 2021
In this series of articles, we take robot innovations from their test-lab and bring them to a randomly selected workplace in the outside world. We discovered that Lunar Zebro is not only good for risk...
Navigating beneath the Arctic ice
MIT News
25 Apr 2021
By Mary Beth Gallagher | Department of Mechanical Engineering
There is a lot of activity beneath the vast, lonely expanses of ice and snow in the Arctic. Climate change has dramatically altered the...
ManipulaTHOR: a framework for visual object manipulation
Allen Inst for Artificial Intelligence
23 Apr 2021
The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) announced the 3.0 release of its embodied artificial intelligence framework AI2-THOR, which adds active object manipulation to its testing framework. ManipulaTHOR is a...
Perfecting self-driving cars – can it be done?
posteriori/Shutterstock
Robotic vehicles have been used in dangerous environments for decades, from decommissioning the Fukushima nuclear power plant or inspecting underwater energy infrastructur...
ULTRA-SWARM: Creating digital twins of UAV swarms for firefighting and aid delivery
Georgios Tzoumas
20 Apr 2021
For my PhD, I'm studying how global problems such as wildfires and aid delivery in remote areas can benefit from innovative technologies such as UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) swarms.
Every year, v...
Robots flying a kite to generate electricity
Fay de Grefte
15 Apr 2021
Since 2007, two professors at the TU Delft have been researching ways to harvest energy from the wind using a kite. The robotic kite looks set to make its debut in the energy sector, but often inventi...
Long-distance robot-assisted heart surgery and beyond
MathWorks
13 Apr 2021
In 2018, five patients at the Apex Heart Institute in Ahmedabad, India, received treatment for coronary artery disease (CAD) the same way 3 million others do each year: a small balloon was inserted in...
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...
A robotic ball with playful intentions
Fay de Grefte
27 Mar 2021
Imagine a ball. When you step closer, the ball rolls away. When you try to catch him, he escapes. This is Fizzy, an autonomous, robotic ball that is programmed to play with children. He is ambiguous, ...
Researchers’ algorithm designs soft robots that sense
MIT News
24 Mar 2021
By Daniel Ackerman | MIT News Office
There are some tasks that traditional robots — the rigid and metallic kind — simply aren’t cut out for. Soft-bodied robots, on the other hand, may be able...
Robot Race: The World´s Top 10 automated countries
International Federation of Robotics (IFR)
21 Mar 2021
The average robot density in the manufacturing industry hit a new global record of 113 units per 10,000 employees. By regions, Western Europe (225 units) and the Nordic European countries (204 units) ...
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...
WiR IV with Johanna Austin, roboticist, helicopter pilot & techsupervixen
Andra Keay and Women In Robotics
14 Mar 2021
Watch Johanna Austin talk about her journey, make her own career path, and trailblazing a way in STEM!! Johanna Austin was the first female Robotics and Automation Research Engineer in Boeing's Melbou...
Ethics of connected and automated vehicles
AI4EU and the European Commission
11 Mar 2021
The European Commission has published a report by an independent group of experts on Ethics of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs). This report advises on specific ethical issues raised by driverl...
Fostering ethical thinking in computing
MIT News
08 Mar 2021
By Terri Park | MIT Schwarzman College of Computing
Traditional computer scientists and engineers are trained to develop solutions for specific needs, but aren’t always trained to consider their...
Winners of the DIH Champions Challenge 2020 revealed at the #EDIH2021 conference
DIHNET
07 Mar 2021
On the 27th of January, DIHNET revealed the winners of the 2020 DIH Champions Challenge at the virtual EDIH Conference 2021 “Gearing up towards European Digital Innovation Hubs”. The awards ceremo...
Robots that feel by seeing
Carlo Sferrazza
06 Mar 2021
While modern cameras provide machines with a very well-developed sense of vision, robots still lack such a comprehensive solution for their sense of touch. At ETH Zurich, in the group led by Prof. Raf...
Call for keynote speakers at the first Reddit Robotics Showcase (RRS2021)
reddit
04 Mar 2021
The reddit r/robotics subreddit is a global online community of 138,000 users, ranging from hobbyists and students to academics and industry professionals. This year, we have invited our community to ...
Researchers introduce a new generation of tiny, agile drones
MIT News
02 Mar 2021
By Daniel Ackerman
If you’ve ever swatted a mosquito away from your face, only to have it return again (and again and again), you know that insects can be remarkably acrobatic and resilient in fl...
Rapid robotics for operator safety: what a bottle picker can do
Joost van de Loo
01 Mar 2021
Dutch brewing company Heineken is one of the largest beer producers in the world with more than 70 production facilities globally. From small breweries to mega-plants, its logistics and production pro...
Digital Innovation Hubs: €1.5 billion network to support green and digital transformation starts to take shape
the European Commission
28 Feb 2021
A two-day discussion on the future of European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIH) took place last month, as over 2000 stakeholders and policy-makers gathered online for the first time to take stock of the...
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...
Introducing Eliza Kosoy; E-liza Dolls
Silicon Valley Robotics and Women In Robotics
18 Feb 2021
Eliza Kosoy is a Ph.D Student at UC Berkeley. She studied mathematics in college and then worked for Prof. Joshua Tenenbaum at MIT in his computational cognitive science lab. She then started on a Ph....
What Holland can teach Silicon Valley: a joint response to unpredictability
Joost van de Loo
12 Feb 2021
Combining drone imagery with weather data and planting schemes to forecast how much fresh vegetables a harvest is going to yield; that’s what predictive modelling intern Berend Klaver from TU De...
Fabricating fully functional drones
MIT News
09 Feb 2021
By Rachel Gordon | MIT CSAIL
From Star Trek’s replicators to Richie Rich’s wishing machine, popular culture has a long history of parading flashy machines that can instantly output any item to ...
Field Robotics: A new, high-quality, online and open-access journal
It has been almost half a year since the mass resignation of the editors and editorial board of the Journal of Field Robotics. In a new turn of events, Peter Corke has recently relaunched Field Roboti...
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...
