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Automated system generates robotic parts for novel tasks
MIT News
21 Jul 2019
By Rob Matheson
An automated system developed by MIT researchers designs and 3-D prints complex robotic parts called actuators that are optimized according to an enormous number of specifications. In...
Professor Patrick Winston, former director of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, dies at 76
MIT News
21 Jul 2019
By Adam Conner-Simons and Rachel Gordon
Patrick Winston, a beloved professor and computer scientist at MIT, died on July 19 at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He was 76.
A profes...
Robots in Depth with Andreas Bihlmaier
Robots in Depth
12 Jul 2019
In this episode of Robots in Depth, Per Sjöborg speaks with Andreas Bihlmaier about modular robotics and starting a robotics company....
Using artificial evolution to design bespoke surgical snakebots
Australian Centre for Robotic Vision
11 Jul 2019
In a world first, Australian Centre for Robotic Vision researchers are pushing the boundaries of evolution to create bespoke, miniaturised surgical robots, uniquely matched to individual patient anato...
Tiny motor can “walk” to carry out tasks
MIT News
11 Jul 2019
By David L. Chandler
Years ago, MIT Professor Neil Gershenfeld had an audacious thought. Struck by the fact that all the world’s living things are built out of combinations of just 20 amino acids, ...
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....
Study: Social robots can benefit hospitalized children
MIT News
30 Jun 2019
A new study demonstrates, for the first time, that “social robots” used in support sessions held in pediatric units at hospitals can lead to more positive emotions in sick children....
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 – ...
The little robot that could
Wyss Institute
22 Jun 2019
iRobot Corp. announced its acquisition of Root Robotics, Inc., whose educational Root coding robot got its start as a summer research project at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineerin...
Spotting objects amid clutter
MIT News
22 Jun 2019
A new MIT-developed technique enables robots to quickly identify objects hidden in a three-dimensional cloud of data, reminiscent of how some people can make sense of a densely patterned “Magic Eye...
Tackling sustainability and urbanization with AI-enabled furniture
Oliver Mitchell
22 Jun 2019
At the turn of the twentieth century, the swelling populations of newly arrived immigrants in New York City’s Lower East Side reached a boiling point, forcing the City to pass the 1901 Tenement ...
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...
Chip design drastically reduces energy needed to compute with light
MIT News
22 Jun 2019
By Rob Matheson
MIT researchers have developed a novel “photonic” chip that uses light instead of electricity — and consumes relatively little power in the process. The chip could be used to p...
Autonomous boats can target and latch onto each other
MIT News
22 Jun 2019
By Rob Matheson
The city of Amsterdam envisions a future where fleets of autonomous boats cruise its many canals to transport goods and people, collect trash, or self-assemble into floating stages an...
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...
Joining forces to boost AI adoption in Europe
SPARC
21 Jun 2019
Europe is gearing up to launch an Artificial Intelligence Public Private Partnership (AI PPP) that brings together AI, data, and robotics. At its core is a drive to lead the world in the development a...
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...
Sensor-packed glove learns signatures of the human grasp
MIT News
03 Jun 2019
By Rob Matheson
Wearing a sensor-packed glove while handling a variety of objects, MIT researchers have compiled a massive dataset that enables an AI system to recognize objects through touch alone. ...
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...
Bringing human-like reasoning to driverless car navigation
MIT News
23 May 2019
By Rob Matheson
With aims of bringing more human-like reasoning to autonomous vehicles, MIT researchers have created a system that uses only simple maps and visual data to enable driverless cars to n...
Live coverage of #ICRA2019
Sabine Hauert
21 May 2019
The IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) is being held this week in Montreal, Canada. It's one of the top venues for roboticists and attracts over 4000 conference goers....
Are ethics keeping pace with technology?
Oliver Mitchell
15 May 2019
Returning from vacation, my inbox overflowed with emails announcing robot “firsts.” At the same time, my relaxed post-vacation disposition was quickly rocked by the news of the day and re...
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...
How to tell whether machine-learning systems are robust enough for the real world
MIT News
12 May 2019
By Rob Matheson
MIT researchers have devised a method for assessing how robust machine-learning models known as neural networks are for various tasks, by detecting when the models make mistakes they ...
Laying the ground for robotic strategies in environmental protection
Wyss Institute
28 Apr 2019
By Benjamin Boettner
Along developed riverbanks, physical barriers can help contain flooding and combat erosion. In arid regions, check dams can help retain soil after rainfall and restore damaged la...
Nanoparticles take a fantastic, magnetic voyage
MIT News
27 Apr 2019
By Anne Trafton
MIT engineers have designed tiny robots that can help drug-delivery nanoparticles push their way out of the bloodstream and into a tumor or another disease site. Like crafts in “Fan...
Bucharest was the European capital of robotics for #ERF2019
SPARC
25 Apr 2019
European Robotics Forum, the most influential meeting of the robotics and AI community, held its 10th anniversary edition in Romania. The event was organized Under the High Patronage of the President ...
Robotic arms and temporary motorisation – the next generation of wheelchairs
Horizon Magazine
21 Apr 2019
by Julianna Photopoulos
Next-generation wheelchairs could incorporate brain-controlled robotic arms and rentable add-on motors in order to help people with disabilities more easily carry out daily ...
Giving robots a better feel for object manipulation
MIT News
21 Apr 2019
By Rob Matheson
A new learning system developed by MIT researchers improves robots’ abilities to mold materials into target shapes and make predictions about interacting with solid objects and liqu...
Robots that can sort recycling
MIT News
21 Apr 2019
By Adam Conner-Simons
Every year trash companies sift through an estimated 68 million tons of recycling, which is the weight equivalent of more than 30 million cars....
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...
Teaching machines to reason about what they see
MIT News
07 Apr 2019
A child who has never seen a pink elephant can still describe one — unlike a computer. “The computer learns from data,” says Jiajun Wu, a PhD student at MIT. “The ability to generalize an...
ProMat preview: Its time to cut the cord
Oliver Mitchell
07 Apr 2019
Last week’s breaking news story on The Robot Report was unfortunately the demise of Helen Greiner’s company, CyPhy Works (d/b/a Aria Insights). The high-flying startup raised close to $...
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...
