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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...
“Particle robot” works as a cluster of simple units
MIT News
05 Apr 2019
Taking a cue from biological cells, researchers from MIT, Columbia University, and elsewhere have developed computationally simple robots that connect in large groups to move around, transport objects...
A rubber computer eliminates the last hard components from soft robots
Wyss Institute
05 Apr 2019
By Caitlin McDermott-Murphy, Harvard University Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
A soft robot, attached to a balloon and submerged in a transparent column of water, dives and surfaces, ...
Women in robotics on International Women’s Day 2019 – updated
Silicon Valley Robotics
08 Mar 2019
What does a day in the life of a woman working with robots look like? We asked members of WomeninRobotics.org to volunteer "a paragraph and a picture" for this first patchwork representation of the fi...
A prosthetic that restores the sense of where your hand is
NCCR Robotics
27 Feb 2019
Researchers have developed a next-generation bionic hand that allows amputees to regain their proprioception. The results of the study, which have been published in Science Robotics, are the culminati...
Controlling false discoveries in large-scale experimentation: Challenges and solutions
BAIR Blog
19 Feb 2019
By Tijana Zrnic “Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself. - The Economist, 2013 There has been a growing concern about the validity of scientific findings. A mul...
Robots track moving objects with unprecedented precision
MIT News
19 Feb 2019
A novel system developed at MIT uses RFID tags to help robots home in on moving objects with unprecedented speed and accuracy. The system could enable greater collaboration and precision by robots wor...
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....
