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Touchy subject: 3D printed fingertip ‘feels’ like human skin
University of Bristol
07 Apr 2022
A highly sensitive, 3D-printed fingertip could help robots become more dexterous and improve the performance of prosthetic hands by giving them an in-built sense of touch.
Careers in robotics: What is a robotics PhD?
Sonia Roberts and Women In Robotics
26 Mar 2022
This post will take you through the overall life cycle of a PhD in the American educational system, and is intended as a basic overview for anyone unfamiliar with the process, whether they are considering a PhD or have a loved one who is currently in a PhD program and just want to learn more about what they are doing.
BirdBot is energy-efficient thanks to nature as a model
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems
19 Mar 2022
A team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the University of California, Irvine constructed a robot leg that, like its natural model, is very energy efficient. BirdBot benefits from a foot-leg coupling through a network of muscles and tendons that extends across multiple joints. In this way, BirdBot needs fewer motors than previous legged robots and could, theoretically, scale to large size.
Seamless transitions between autonomous robot capabilities and human intervention in construction robotics
Silicon Valley Robotics and Andra Keay
15 Mar 2022
Congratulations to the winners of the best paper award of the International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction 2021! This paper presents two human-robot collaboration solutions for welding and joint sealing through the use of a haptic device.
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347
podcast
Event Cameras – An Evolution in Visual Data Capture, with Davide Scaramuzza
Abate De Mey
08 Mar 2022
Davide Scaramuzza deep dives into Event Cameras, a fundamentally new approach to capturing visual data
How to help humans understand robots
MIT News
04 Mar 2022
Theories from cognitive science and psychology could help humans learn to collaborate with robots faster and more effectively, scientists find.
Robotic cubes shapeshift in outer space
MIT News
25 Feb 2022
Self-reconfiguring ElectroVoxels use embedded electromagnets to test applications for space exploration.
Tim Chung: DARPA Subterranean Challenge | Sense Think Act Podcast #14
Audrow Nash and Sense Think Act Podcast
24 Feb 2022
In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks to Tim Chung, Program Manager in the Tactical Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), on the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge...
Czech Digital Innovation Hubs: who are they and how can they help?
DIHNET
20 Feb 2022
In 2016, the Czech Republic and Europe-wide started setting up a network of Digital Innovation Hubs. Since then, the Digital Europe Programme has come into force and introduced the new term European Digital Innovation Hubs. What can DIHs and EDIHs offer? Which are the relevant contacts in Czechia? This article will bring the answers.
Beach bots, sea ‘raptors’ and marine toolsets mobilised to get rid of marine litter
Horizon Magazine
15 Feb 2022
Often quickly disposed of but lasting in the environment for tens to hundreds of years, plastic litter pollutes our seas worldwide, creating a serious threat to wildlife and contributing to climate change as they break down.
Steve Macenski: Open Source Robot Navigation | Sense Think Act Podcast #13
Audrow Nash and Sense Think Act Podcast
09 Feb 2022
In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks to Steve Macenski, who is the Open Source Robotics Engineering Lead at Samsung Research America. Steve leads the Nav2 project, which is an open source robot navigat...
Bristol scientists develop insect-sized flying robots with flapping wings
University of Bristol
03 Feb 2022
A new drive system for flapping wing autonomous robots has been developed by a University of Bristol team, using a new method of electromechanical zipping that does away with the need for conventional motors and gears.
Radhika Nagpal at #NeurIPS2021: the collective intelligence of army ants
Lucy Smith
01 Feb 2022
Radhika’s research focusses on collective intelligence, with the overarching goal being to understand how large groups of individuals, with local interaction rules, can cooperate to achieve globally complex behaviour.
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344
podcast
Learning for Collaboration, Not Competition, with Jakob Foerster
Kegan Strawn
25 Jan 2022
Jakob Foerster, an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, dives into his work on multi-agent reinforcement learning.
Tamim Asfour’s Keynote talk – Learning humanoid manipulation from humans
Daniel Carrillo-Zapata and IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS)
25 Jan 2022
Tamim Asfour gives an overview of the developments in manipulation for robotic systems his lab has done by learning manipulation task models from human observations, and the challenges and open questions associated with this.
How robots learn to hike
ETH Zurich
20 Jan 2022
A new control approach that enables a legged robot, called ANYmal, to move quickly and robustly over difficult terrain.
Science Magazine robot videos 2021
Daniel Carrillo-Zapata
14 Jan 2022
A compilation of Science Magazine videos featuring robotics research that were released during last year.
Robot reinforcement learning: safety in real-world applications
How can we make a robot learn in the real world while ensuring safety? In this post, best paper award finalists at CoRL explain all.
Giving bug-like bots a boost
MIT News
17 Dec 2021
A new fabrication technique produces low-voltage, power-dense artificial muscles that improve the performance of flying microrobots.
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342
podcast
Unconventional Space Robots, with Stephanie Schneider
Lilly Clark
17 Dec 2021
Schneider, PhD Candidate at Stanford, explains her work on Reachbot, a long-reach crawling and anchoring robot repurposes extendable booms for mobile manipulation in Outer Space. They discuss the challenges and exciting elements of robotic prototyping for low-gravity or otherwise unique environments.
Interview with Huy Ha and Shuran Song: CoRL 2021 best system paper award winners
Daniel Carrillo-Zapata
12 Dec 2021
The award-winning authors describe their work on a self-supervised framework for cloth unfolding which uses a pick, stretch, and fling primitive for a dual-arm setup from visual observations.
Team builds first living robots that can reproduce
Wyss Institute
02 Dec 2021
AI-designed Xenobots reveal entirely new form of biological self-replication—promising for regenerative medicine.
Interview with Tao Chen, Jie Xu and Pulkit Agrawal: CoRL 2021 best paper award winners
Lucy Smith
24 Nov 2021
The award-winning authors describe their work on a system for general in-hand object re-orientation.
Top tweets from the Conference on Robot Learning #CoRL2021
Daniel Carrillo-Zapata
19 Nov 2021
In this post we bring you a glimpse of the conference through the most popular tweets about the conference written last week. Cool robot demos, short and sweet explanation of papers and award finalists to look forward to next year's edition.
Finding inspiration in starfish larva
ETH Zurich
17 Nov 2021
Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a tiny robot that mimics the movement of a starfish larva. It is driven by sound waves and equipped with tiny hairs that direct the fluid around it, just like its natural model. In the future, such microswimmers could deliver drugs to diseased cells with pinpoint accuracy.
RECON: Learning to explore the real world with a ground robot
BAIR Blog
09 Nov 2021
RECON provides a robust way to using past experience to accelerate learning in a new environment through the combination of goal sampling and topological memory.
From a garage to Swiss lakes and rivers: the story of Proteus, an underwater robot
Andrej Studer
01 Nov 2021
Know the story of Proteus, an underwater robot developed by a Swiss student spin-off who partnered up with real divers from the Swiss Explosive Ordnance Disposal to retrieve lost ammunition from Swiss lakes.
Making RL tractable by learning more informative reward functions: example-based control, meta-learning, and normalized maximum likelihood
BAIR Blog
30 Oct 2021
In our recent work, we design a reward specification technique that naturally incentivizes exploration and enables agents to explore environments in a directed way.
IEEE 17th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering paper awards (with videos)
Daniel Carrillo-Zapata and IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS)
27 Oct 2021
The IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE) is the flagship automation conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and constitutes the primary forum for c...
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340
podcast
NVIDIA and ROS Teaming Up To Accelerate Robotics Development, with Amit Goel
Abate De Mey
23 Oct 2021
Amit Goel, Director of Product Management for Autonomous Machines at NVIDIA, discusses the new collaboration between Open Robotics and NVIDIA. The collaboration will dramatically improve the way ROS and NVIDIA's line of products such as Isaac SIM and the Jetson line of embedded boards operate together.
One giant leap for the mini cheetah
MIT News
23 Oct 2021
A new control system, demonstrated using MIT’s robotic mini cheetah, enables four-legged robots to jump across uneven terrain in real-time.
Robotics Today latest talks – Raia Hadsell (DeepMind), Koushil Sreenath (UC Berkeley) and Antonio Bicchi (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia)
Daniel Carrillo-Zapata and Robotics Today
21 Oct 2021
Robotics Today held three more online talks since we published the one from Amanda Prorok (Learning to Communicate in Multi-Agent Systems). In this post we bring you the last talks that Robotics Today...
A robot that finds lost items
MIT News
18 Oct 2021
Researchers at MIT have created RFusion, a robotic arm with a camera and radio frequency (RF) antenna attached to its gripper, that fuses signals from the antenna with visual input from the camera to locate and retrieve an item, even if the item is buried under a pile and completely out of view.
Flying high-speed drones into the unknown with AI
NCCR Robotics
08 Oct 2021
When it comes to exploring complex and unknown environments such as forests, buildings or caves, drones are hard to beat. They are fast, agile and small, and they can carry sensors and payloads virtua...
To swim like a tuna, robotic fish need to change how stiff their tails are in real time
The Conversation
05 Oct 2021
Researchers have been building robotic fish for years, but the performance has never approached the efficiency of real fish. Daniel Quinn, CC BY-NC
By Daniel Quinn
Underwater vehicles haven’t ...
Robert Wood’s Plenary Talk: Soft robotics for delicate and dexterous manipulation
IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS)
03 Oct 2021
Robotic grasping and manipulation has historically been dominated by rigid grippers, force/form closure constraints, and extensive grasp trajectory planning. The advent of soft robotics offers new ave...
