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research
Engineers create a programmable fiber
MIT News
03 Jun 2021
By Becky Ham | MIT News correspondent
MIT researchers have created the first fiber with digital capabilities, able to sense, store, analyze, and infer activity after being sewn into a shirt.
...
The new IIT’s “Robot Teleoperativo” (teleoperation robot)
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
01 Jun 2021
The Robot Teleoperativo is a new robotics result achieved at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and combining the rugged locomotion of HyQReal robot with dexterous and powerful manipulation assured b...
Slender robotic finger senses buried items
MIT News
27 May 2021
By Daniel Ackerman
Over the years, robots have gotten quite good at identifying objects — as long as they’re out in the open.
Discerning buried items in granular material like sand is a ...
Meet the #NCCRWomen in robotics
NCCR Digital Fabrication (DFAB)
24 May 2021
Meet Maria Vittoria and Inés!
To celebrate Women’s Day 2021 and the 50th anniversary of women's right to vote in Switzerland, the Swiss NCCRs (National Centres of Competence in Research) wanted to...
Creating expressive robot swarms
Merihan Alhafnawi
23 May 2021
As robot swarms leave the lab and enter our daily lives, it is important that we find ways by which we can effectively communicate with robot swarms, especially ones that contain a high number of robo...
Helping drone swarms avoid obstacles without hitting each other
EPFL
20 May 2021
By Clara Marc
There is strength in numbers. That’s true not only for humans, but for drones too. By flying in a swarm, they can cover larger areas and collect a wider range of data, since each dr...
Robot stomachs: powering machines with garbage and pee
Oliver Mitchell
14 May 2021
The Seinfeld idiom, “worlds are colliding,” is probably the best description of work in the age of Corona. Pre-pandemic, it was easy to departmentalize one’s professional life from o...
Foldable, organic and easily broken down: Why DNA is the material of choice for nanorobots
Horizon Magazine
11 May 2021
By Anthony King
Doctors know that we need smarter medicines to target the bad guys only. One hope is that tiny robots on the scale of a billionth of a metre can come to the rescue, delivering drugs...
ep.
332
podcast
Swarms in Space, with Giovanni Beltrame
Lilly Clark
10 May 2021
Robohub Podcast · Swarms in Space
In this episode, Lilly interviews Giovanni Beltrame, Professor of Computer and Software Engineering at École Polytechnique de Montréal where he directs the Maki...
Fish-inspired soft robot survives a trip to the deepest part of the ocean
Dimitris Tsakiris
05 May 2021
The deepest regions of the oceans still remain one of the least explored areas on Earth, despite their considerable scientific interest and the richness of lifeforms inhabiting them.
Two reasons f...
DNA-inspired ‘supercoiling’ fibres could make powerful artificial muscles for robots
Geoff Spinks
03 May 2021
ShutterstockThe double helix of DNA is one of the most iconic symbols in science. By imitating the structure of this complex genetic molecule we have found a way to make artificial muscle fibres far m...
Q&A: Vivienne Sze on crossing the hardware-software divide for efficient artificial intelligence
MIT News
02 May 2021
Not so long ago, watching a movie on a smartphone seemed impossible. Vivienne Sze was a graduate student at MIT at the time, in the mid 2000s, and she was drawn to the challenge of compressing video t...
Moon exploration rovers from Lunar Zebro
Fay de Grefte
28 Apr 2021
In this series of articles, we take robot innovations from their test-lab and bring them to a randomly selected workplace in the outside world. We discovered that Lunar Zebro is not only good for risk...
Navigating beneath the Arctic ice
MIT News
25 Apr 2021
By Mary Beth Gallagher | Department of Mechanical Engineering
There is a lot of activity beneath the vast, lonely expanses of ice and snow in the Arctic. Climate change has dramatically altered the...
Perfecting self-driving cars – can it be done?
posteriori/Shutterstock
Robotic vehicles have been used in dangerous environments for decades, from decommissioning the Fukushima nuclear power plant or inspecting underwater energy infrastructur...
Amanda Prorok’s talk – Learning to Communicate in Multi-Agent Systems (with video)
Robotics Today
17 Apr 2021
In this technical talk, Amanda Prorok, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of Pembroke College, discusses her team's latest r...
Robots flying a kite to generate electricity
Fay de Grefte
15 Apr 2021
Since 2007, two professors at the TU Delft have been researching ways to harvest energy from the wind using a kite. The robotic kite looks set to make its debut in the energy sector, but often inventi...
Talking Robotics’ seminars of January – April 2021 (with videos and even a musical summary!)
Daniel Carrillo-Zapata and Talking Robotics
09 Apr 2021
Talking Robotics is a series of virtual seminars about Robotics and its interaction with other relevant fields, such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Design Research, Human-Robot Interact...
A robot that senses hidden objects
MIT News
03 Apr 2021
By Daniel Ackerman | MIT News Office
In recent years, robots have gained artificial vision, touch, and even smell. “Researchers have been giving robots human-like perception,” says MIT Associa...
Towards mapping unknown environments with a robot swarm
Mapping is an essential task in many robotics applications. A map is a representation of the environment generated from robots positions and sensors data. A map can be either used to navigate the robo...
ep.
331
podcast
Multi-Robot Learning, with Amanda Prorok
Lilly Clark
29 Mar 2021
Robohub Podcast · Multi-Robot Learning
In this episode, Lilly interviews Amanda Prorok, Professor of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. Prorok discusses her research o...
Researchers’ algorithm designs soft robots that sense
MIT News
24 Mar 2021
By Daniel Ackerman | MIT News Office
There are some tasks that traditional robots — the rigid and metallic kind — simply aren’t cut out for. Soft-bodied robots, on the other hand, may be able...
Back to Robot Coding part 3: testing the EBB
Alan Winfield
23 Mar 2021
In part 2 a few weeks ago I outlined a Python implementation of the ethical black box. I described the key data structure - a dictionary which serves as both specification for the type of robot, and t...
System detects errors when medication is self-administered
MIT News
19 Mar 2021
From swallowing pills to injecting insulin, patients frequently administer their own medication. But they don’t always get it right. Improper adherence to doctors’ orders is commonplace, accountin...
Maximum Entropy RL (Provably) Solves Some Robust RL Problems
BAIR Blog
15 Mar 2021
By Ben Eysenbach
Nearly all real-world applications of reinforcement learning involve some degree of shift between the training environment and the testing environment. However, prior work has obse...
Robots that feel by seeing
Carlo Sferrazza
06 Mar 2021
While modern cameras provide machines with a very well-developed sense of vision, robots still lack such a comprehensive solution for their sense of touch. At ETH Zurich, in the group led by Prof. Raf...
Researchers introduce a new generation of tiny, agile drones
MIT News
02 Mar 2021
By Daniel Ackerman
If you’ve ever swatted a mosquito away from your face, only to have it return again (and again and again), you know that insects can be remarkably acrobatic and resilient in fl...
Digital Innovation Hubs: €1.5 billion network to support green and digital transformation starts to take shape
the European Commission
28 Feb 2021
A two-day discussion on the future of European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIH) took place last month, as over 2000 stakeholders and policy-makers gathered online for the first time to take stock of the...
Self-supervised policy adaptation during deployment
BAIR Blog
26 Feb 2021
Our method learns a task in a fixed, simulated environment and quickly adapts
to new environments (e.g. the real world) solely from online interaction during
deployment.
The ability for hum...
Back to Robot Coding part 2: the ethical black box
Alan Winfield
20 Feb 2021
In the last few days I started some serious coding. The first for 20 years, in fact, when I built the software for the BRL LinuxBots. (The coding I did six months ago doesn't really count as I was onl...
RoMi-H: Bringing robot traffic control to healthcare
Open Robotics
15 Feb 2021
Imagine for a moment that a road is used only for a single car and driver. Everything is smooth and wonderful. Then you wake up from that utopian dream and remember that our road networks have multipl...
Fabricating fully functional drones
MIT News
09 Feb 2021
By Rachel Gordon | MIT CSAIL
From Star Trek’s replicators to Richie Rich’s wishing machine, popular culture has a long history of parading flashy machines that can instantly output any item to ...
Soft robots for ocean exploration and offshore operations: A perspective
Simona Aracri
06 Feb 2021
Most of the ocean is unknown. Yet we know that the most challenging environments on the planet reside in it. Understanding the ocean in its totality is a key component for the sustainable development ...
Wielding a laser beam deep inside the body
Wyss Institute
04 Feb 2021
A microrobotic opto-electro-mechanical device able to steer a laser beam with high speed and a large range of motion could enhance the possibilities of minimally invasive surgeries
By Benjamin Boet...
Robotic swarm swims like a school of fish
Wyss Institute
01 Feb 2021
By Leah Burrows / SEAS Communications
Schools of fish exhibit complex, synchronized behaviors that help them find food, migrate, and evade predators. No one fish or sub-group of fish coordinates th...
ep.
327
podcast
Computational Design, with Bernhard Thomaszewski
Lilly Clark
27 Jan 2021
Robohub Podcast · Computational Design
Lilly interviews Bernhard Thomaszewski, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Montréal and research scientist at ETH Zurich. Thomaszewski discu...
