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A variable stiffness fiber that self-heals
NCCR Robotics
27 Oct 2016
A group from Floreano Lab, EPFL and NCCR Robotics has today published their novel variable stiffness fibre with self-healing capability.
Soft “hardware” components are becoming more and more po...
Electric motors expanding application and efficiency in robots, ships, cars, and microgrids
MIT News
25 Oct 2016
Electric motors have been around since Thomas Davenport built the first functional model in 1834, and they have played a growing part in our lives ever since. Today, they continue to replace diesel an...
Protecting infrastructure and innovation, under Section 2209 of the FAA extension
Diana Marina Cooper
25 Oct 2016
On July 15, 2016, Congress enacted the FAA Extension, Safety, and Security Act (the “Act”), which among other things, directs the Secretary of Transportation to establish a process to enable appli...
The Drone Center’s Weekly Roundup: 10/24/16
October 17, 2016 – October 23, 2016
At the Center for the Study of the Drone
In their perennial bid to better understand the weather, scientists are increasingly turning to drones, from high-a...
Robot-assisted search and rescue conducts joint training exercise with Italian Coast Guard
Robin Murphy and Gianluca Antonelli
24 Oct 2016
The Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) at Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station conducted a joint training exercise with the Italian Coast Guard in Genoa, Italy to prevent fu...
Swarms of precision agriculture robots could help put food on the table
Swarms of drones will help farmers map weeds in their fields and improve crop yields. This is the promise of an ECHORD++ funded research project called ‘SAGA: Swarm Robotics for Agricultural Appli...
Prepping a robot for its journey to Mars
MIT News
21 Oct 2016
Sarah Hensley is preparing an astronaut named Valkyrie for a mission to Mars. It is 6 feet tall, weighs 300 pounds, and is equipped with an extended chest cavity that makes it look distinctly female. ...
Introducing H-ROS: the Hardware Robot Operating System
Víctor Mayoral Vilches
20 Oct 2016
I’m delighted to announce a new game-changing standard for building robot hardware components: H-ROS (the Hardware Robot Operating System). H-ROS provides manufacturers tools for building interope...
Schiaparelli, are you there? The high risks of space robotics again crash home
Alex Kirkpatrick
20 Oct 2016
In Darmstadt, Germany, European Space Agency (ESA) teams are scrambling to confirm contact with the Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module (EDM), Schiaparelli—the spectre of Philae still hau...
Who are the most active robotics investors?
Andra Keay and Silicon Valley Robotics
19 Oct 2016
You may be surprised, but I’m not. These are the people I see regularly both in Silicon Valley and overseas interacting with the robotics community. That makes them the smart money (most of the time...
Professor Emeritus Whitman Richards dies at 84
CSAIL MIT
18 Oct 2016
Whitman Richards '53, PhD '65, professor emeritus of cognitive sciences and of media arts and sciences and principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, died o...
The Drone Center’s Weekly Roundup: 10/17/16
October 10, 2016 – October 16, 2016
At the Center for the Study of the Drone
The U.S. president plays a key role in determining the country’s counterterrorism policies, including the use of ...
President Obama discusses artificial intelligence with Media Lab Director Joi Ito
MIT News
17 Oct 2016
When President Barack Obama agreed to guest-edit the November issue of WIRED, he selected MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito for an exchange of ideas about artificial intelligence (AI). Their recent inter...
White House releases reports focusing on opportunities and challenges of AI
Dave Gershgorn
14 Oct 2016
While the future of artificial intelligence is probably going to be driven by Silicon Valley, the folks in Washington DC want their say about how it will work, too.
In two reports, the White House ...
Foundry tool: Multi-material designing for 3-D printing
CSAIL MIT
13 Oct 2016
3-D printing has progressed over the last decade to include multi-material fabrication, enabling production of powerful, functional objects. While many advances have been made, it still has been diffi...
It’s not only engineers who work in robotics
Hallie Siegel
12 Oct 2016
Robotics has always been an interdisciplinary field - one that integrates knowledge from computer science, mechanical, electrical, controls, and other areas of engineering. But as robots move out of f...
Launching the Women in Robotics network
Silicon Valley Robotics
11 Oct 2016
Women in Robotics is a new international professional community. If you are a woman who works in robotics, or who aspires to, we are inviting you to join! ...
The Drone Center’s Weekly Roundup: 10/10/16
October 3, 2016 – October 9, 2016
News
A U.S. drone strike in Syria killed Abu al-Farai al-Masri, an Egyptian-born veteran of al-Qaeda and leader of Jabhat al-Nusra. According to a statement b...
Oxbotica’s autonomous vehicle software learns its environment and how it changes over time
Kassie Perlongo
10 Oct 2016
Oxbotica, a UK technology company with a focus on mobile robotics and driverless vehicles, has created Selenium, an autonomous software system acting similar to a 'brain' for a vehicle. Selenium can...
Welcoming new global partners
Andra Keay and Silicon Valley Robotics
10 Oct 2016
Silicon Valley Robotics held an innovation tour for some of our global partners ahead of the RoboBusiness conference in San Jose. Representatives from Odense Robotics Cluster, Invest in Denmark and De...
Powered arm prosthesis race at Cybathlon
NCCR Robotics
07 Oct 2016
This week, the world’s first Cybathlon will take place in Zurich, Switzerland and today we present to you the second of the NCCR Robotics teams to be taking part in the competition, LeMano. The Cyba...
In motion: Video transmission by mobile drones
Christian Bettstetter
07 Oct 2016
Raheeb Muzaffar, an information technology specialist, has developed an application-layer framework that improves the transmission of videos between moving drones and mobile devices located at ground ...
Virtual race: Competing in Brain Computer Interface at Cybathlon
NCCR Robotics
05 Oct 2016
This week the world’s first Cybathlon will take place in Zurich, Switzerland. Cybathlon is the brainchild of NCCR Robotics co-director and ETH Zurich professor Robert Riener, and is designed to faci...
Drone flight through narrow gaps using onboard sensing and computing
In this work, we address one of the main challenges towards autonomous drone flight in complex environments, which is flight through narrow gaps....
The Drone Center’s Weekly Roundup: 10/3/16
September 26, 2016 – October 2, 2016
News
A U.S. drone strike killed at least fifteen people in Afghanistan’s eastern Achin district. The United Nations reported that the individuals who di...
Robohub Digest 09/16: AI100, RoboLaw, sailing and farming robots
Jana Witt and Kassie Perlongo
03 Oct 2016
A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox....
Drone learns to see in zero-gravity
Guido de Croon
03 Oct 2016
During an experiment performed on board of the International Space Station (ISS) a small drone successfully learned by itself to see distances using only one eye, reported scientists at the 67th Inter...
3-D printed robots with shock-absorbing skins
CSAIL MIT
03 Oct 2016
Anyone who’s watched drone videos or an episode of BattleBots knows that robots can break - and often it’s because they don’t have the proper padding to protect themselves.
But this week rese...
Replicable and measureable robotics research: Back to the basics of the scientific method
Fabio Bonsignorio
30 Sep 2016
In general, as any robotics and/or AI PhD student knows very well, replicating the research results of other labs is quite difficult. The information you can customary find in a reputed journal paper ...
$60 million committed to Smart Cities Initiative
the National Science Foundation (NSF)
29 Sep 2016
From autonomous vehicles to flash flood alert systems, technology transforms how people lead their daily lives and how local cities and communities function.
Last September, the Administration laun...
Farewell to Vic Scheinman, inventor of the modern robot arm
Silicon Valley Robotics
29 Sep 2016
We are sad to learn that Victor Scheinman passed away on September 20, from complications of heart disease. He was 73. Victor Scheinman was the inventor of the Stanford Arm, the first all-electric ...
XoSoft: Intelligent trousers designed to assist people with limited mobility
Advancement in healthcare and medicine and other comforts of modernity make us live longer than our ancestors: the life expectancy of the average European nearly doubled during the last century. As li...
Michigan’s automated driving bills
Bryant Walker Smith
26 Sep 2016
Michigan's Senate are reviewing several bills related to automated driving. SB995, 996, 997, and 998 are now out of committee, and SB 927 and 928 are not far behind. These bills seem to be a mixed bag...
Robots can successfully imitate human motions in the operating room
Frontiers in Robotics and AI
26 Sep 2016
By: Marcus Banks
The nursing assistant for your next trip to the hospital might be a robot. This is the implication of research recently published by Dr. Elena De Momi and colleagues in the open a...
What’s new in robotics this week: British Standards Institute releases guidelines for ethical robot design
Emmet Cole and Robotiq Inc.
23 Sep 2016
Ethics guidelines for robots; $1m grant for cobot research; Lyft fleet to be autonomous in 5 years; self-driving car policy; Russian bot arrested, and more. Find out what's happening in our robotics ...
US Department of Transportation issues guidance for automated driving
Bryant Walker Smith
21 Sep 2016
With the recent announcement, the US Department of Transportation is enthusiastically embracing automated driving. It's saying that self-driving vehicles are coming in some form (or many forms) and th...
