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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...
Is the green new deal sustainable?
Oliver Mitchell
12 Feb 2019
This week Washington DC was abuzz with news that had nothing to do with the occupant of The While House. A group of progressive legislators, led by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, in the House of Representat...
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...
Identifying artificial intelligence “blind spots”
MIT News
25 Jan 2019
By Rob Matheson
A novel model developed by MIT and Microsoft researchers identifies instances in which autonomous systems have “learned” from training examples that don’t match what’s actuall...
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...
Holiday robot videos 2018 – part 3
Robohub Editors
25 Dec 2018
Thanks to all for sending your holiday videos, here's the last of this year's series. Merry Christmas!...
Holiday robot videos 2018 – part 2
Robohub Editors
22 Dec 2018
Happy holidays everyone! Here are some more robot videos to get you into the holiday spirit....
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 ...
Call for robot holiday videos 2018
Robohub Editors
16 Dec 2018
That's right! You better not run, you better not hide, you better watch out for brand new robot holiday videos on Robohub! Drop your submissions down our chimney at sabine.hauert@robohub.org and shar...
Robot makes world-first baby coral delivery to Great Barrier Reef
QUT
16 Dec 2018
In a world first, an undersea robot has dispersed microscopic baby corals (coral larvae) to help scientists working to repopulate parts of the Great Barrier Reef during this year’s mass coral spawni...
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...
3Q: Aleksander Madry on building trustworthy artificial intelligence
MIT News
16 Dec 2018
By Kim Martineau
Machine learning algorithms now underlie much of the software we use, helping to personalize our news feeds and finish our thoughts before we’re done typing. But as artificial inte...
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...
Elowan: A plant-robot hybrid
MIT Media Lab
09 Dec 2018
Elowan is a cybernetic lifeform, a plant in direct dialogue with a machine. Using its own internal electrical signals, the plant is interfaced with a robotic extension that drives it toward light.
...
Inside “The Laughing Room”
MIT News
09 Dec 2018
By Brigham Fay
“The Laughing Room,” an interactive art installation by author, illustrator, and MIT graduate student Jonathan "Jonny" Sun, looks like a typical living room: couches, armchair...
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 ...
Reproducing paintings that make an impression
MIT News
02 Dec 2018
By Rachel Gordon
The empty frames hanging inside the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum serve as a tangible reminder of the world’s biggest unsolved art heist. While the original masterpieces may...
Q&A with Cecilia Laschi – The Robotics Flagship
Sabine Hauert
25 Nov 2018
Why is a Robotics Flagship needed?
Robotics is a solid technological field, with important market opportunities. Europe contributed significantly to the growth of knowledge in this field and it is co...
European Robotics Week 2018 celebrated with 1200 events in over 30 countries
SPARC
25 Nov 2018
The European Robotics Week (ERW) is achieving a major success with around 1200 interactive robotics related events across Europe, showing how robots will impact the way we work, live, and learn both n...
Teaching robotics with ROS
Ricardo Téllez
24 Nov 2018
A couple of months ago I interviewed Joel Esposito about the state of robotics education for the ROS Developers Podcast #21. On that podcast, Joel talks about his research on how robotics is taug...
Using electricity and water, a new kind of motor can slide microrobots into motion
MIT News
19 Nov 2018
Look around and you'll likely see something that runs on an electric motor. Powerful and efficient, they keep much of our world moving, everything from our computers to refrigerators to the automatic ...
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...
Robotics Flagship: What the community thinks
Sabine Hauert
10 Nov 2018
In February we asked for input from the robotics community regarding a potential Robotics Flagship, a pan European interdisciplinary effort with 1B EUR in funding, if successful! The goal of the flags...
Robots in Depth with Richard Voyles
Robots in Depth
09 Nov 2018
In this episode of Robots in Depth, Per Sjöborg speaks with Richard Voyles about rescue robotics and advising politicians about robotics....
ANYmal robot tested on offshore platform
Péter Fankhauser
04 Nov 2018
A crucial task for energy providers is the reliable and safe operation of their plants, especially when producing energy offshore. Autonomous mobile robots are able to offer comprehensive support thro...
Fleets of drones could aid searches for lost hikers
MIT News
04 Nov 2018
By Rob Matheson
Finding lost hikers in forests can be a difficult and lengthy process, as helicopters and drones can’t get a glimpse through the thick tree canopy. Recently, it’s been proposed ...
Machines that learn language more like kids do
MIT News
04 Nov 2018
By Rob Matheson
Children learn language by observing their environment, listening to the people around them, and connecting the dots between what they see and hear. Among other things, this helps chi...
Robots in Depth with Stefano Stramigioli
Robots in Depth
04 Nov 2018
In this episode of Robots in Depth, Per Sjöborg speaks with Stefano Stramigioli about the Robotics and Mechatronics lab he leads at University of Twente. The lab focuses on inspection and maintenance...
Small flying robots able to pull objects up to 40 times their weight
NCCR Robotics
04 Nov 2018
Researchers from EPFL and Stanford have developed small drones that can land and then move objects that are 40 times their weight, with the help of powerful winches, gecko adhesives and microspines....
Two new robots for the nursing sector
Fraunhofer IPA
30 Oct 2018
As part of the “SeRoDi” project (“Service Robotics for Personal Services”), Fraunhofer IPA collaborated with other research and application partners to develop new service robotics solutions f...
