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Simulations, real robots, and bloopers from the DOTS competition: Powering emergency food distribution using swarms
Suet Lee and Sabine Hauert
24 Jun 2021
Results from the DOTS competition were released yesterday, after an intense month with teams from around the world designing new algorithms for robot swarms tasked with delivering emergency food parce...
Robot farmers could improve jobs and help fight climate change – if they’re developed responsibly
Thorvald: an autonomous robot from Saga Robotics Matt Munro, Saga Robotics, Author providedFarming robots that can move autonomously in an open field or greenhouse promise a cleaner, safer agricultura...
Robot Lab Live at the UK Festival of Robotics 2021 #RobotFest
Daniel Carrillo-Zapata
21 Jun 2021
For five years, the EPSRC UK Robotics and Autonomous Systems (UK-RAS) Network have been holding the UK Robotics Week. This year's edition kicked off on the 19th of June as the UK Festival of Robotics ...
IEEE ICRA 2021 Awards (with videos and papers)
Daniel Carrillo-Zapata
15 Jun 2021
Did you have the chance to attend the 2021 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2021)? Here we bring you the papers that received an award this year in case you missed them. Congr...
Obstacles no problem for smart robots
Joost van de Loo
13 Jun 2021
Normally, students and scientists walk here, but today a drone is flying through a corridor on TU Delft Campus. Seemingly effortlessly, it whizzes past and between a variety of obstacles: rubbish bins...
A camera that knows exactly where it is
University of Bristol
09 Jun 2021
Knowing where you are on a map is one of the most useful pieces of information when navigating journeys. It allows you to plan where to go next and also tracks where you have been before. This is esse...
Engineers create a programmable fiber
MIT News
03 Jun 2021
By Becky Ham | MIT News correspondent
MIT researchers have created the first fiber with digital capabilities, able to sense, store, analyze, and infer activity after being sewn into a shirt.
...
The new IIT’s “Robot Teleoperativo” (teleoperation robot)
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
01 Jun 2021
The Robot Teleoperativo is a new robotics result achieved at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and combining the rugged locomotion of HyQReal robot with dexterous and powerful manipulation assured b...
Meet the #NCCRWomen in robotics
NCCR Digital Fabrication (DFAB)
24 May 2021
Meet Maria Vittoria and Inés!
To celebrate Women’s Day 2021 and the 50th anniversary of women's right to vote in Switzerland, the Swiss NCCRs (National Centres of Competence in Research) wanted to...
Creating expressive robot swarms
Merihan Alhafnawi
23 May 2021
As robot swarms leave the lab and enter our daily lives, it is important that we find ways by which we can effectively communicate with robot swarms, especially ones that contain a high number of robo...
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 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) ...
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...
How to build a robotics startup: the product idea
Ricardo Téllez
23 Feb 2021
In this podcast series of episodes we are going to explain how to create a robotics startup step by step.
We are going to learn how to select your co-founders, your team, how to look for investors,...
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....
