Switzerland

Rescue drone that finds survivors using their cellphones’ WiFi signals

Dronologista 25 Jul 2014

Search and rescue operations are increasingly using drones, and the speed and ease with which UAVs can be launched is especially important when applying them as an emergency response tool. Jonathan C...

Noonee: The chairless Chair

NCCR Robotics 20 Jun 2014

Noonee® is a new Start Up company coming out of research in robotics in Switzerland. Aimed at solving healthcare problems within the manufacturing industry, noonee adopts a Chairless Chair® approac...

Microsoft pays 5M CHF to ETHZ and EPFL for research on flying robots and new memory architectures

Robohub Editors 07 Feb 2014

ETH Zurich and EPFL are jointly entering into a new research partnership with Microsoft Research. Over five years, Microsoft Research will provide five million Swiss francs of funding to support IT re...

Cubli – A cube that can jump up, balance, and walk across your desk

Gajan Mohanarajah and Markus Waibel 20 Dec 2013

2022 update: A new, one-wheeled version of the Cubli has been developed. The one-wheel Cubli is a three-dimensional pendulum system that can balance on its pivot using a single reaction wheel, as it i...

Minimally-invasive eye surgery on the horizon as magnetically-guided microbots approach clinical trials

Simone Schürle 26 Jun 2013

Unlike larger robots, microrobots for applications in the body are too small to carry batteries and motors. To address this challenge, we power and control robots made of magnetic materials using exte...

The Distributed Flight Array: Modular robots that self-assemble, coordinate and take flight

Raymond Oung 12 Jun 2013

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts" — a catch phrase that aptly expresses the Distributed Flight Array: a modular robot consisting of hexagonal-shaped single-rotor units that can take ...

Gecko adhesives allow flying robot to perch on walls

Sabine Hauert 15 May 2013

The Airburr, a light-weight flying robot from the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (my PhD lab) at EPFL, was designed to fly in cluttered environments. Unlike most flying robot, which avoid contact a...

The Swinging Blind Juggler

Markus Waibel 03 May 2013

How do you like to go up in a swing, Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing Ever a child can do! Child's Garden of Verses by Robert L. Stephenson...

EPFL’s Festival Robotique draws a record 17,000 visitors

Robohub Editors 24 Apr 2013

The 6th Annual Festival Robotique in Lausanne, Switzerland drew a record number of visitors this past Saturday, making it one of the largest public science events in the country....

Designed to mingle: Rezero ballbot’s smooth moves can handle a crowd

Hallie Siegel 05 Mar 2013

Designing robots that can function outside of controlled, factory environments isn’t easy. When those environments have people in them, they are especially unpredictable and difficult for a robot to...

Video: Quadrocopter learns from its mistakes, perfects air racing

Markus Waibel 08 Nov 2012

Manual programming of robots only gets you so far. And, as you can see in the video, for quadrocopters that's not very far at all (see the "Without Learning" part starting at 1:30):...

Swiss robotics, with Dario Floreano

Podcast team 15 Jun 2012

Link to audio file (20:20)In this episode we talk to Dario Floreano, director of the Swiss National Center of Competence for Research (NCCR) in Robotics that gathers leading experts in the field worki...