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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....
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...
