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c-Research-Innovation
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...
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...
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...
IEEE RAS Soft Robotics Podcast with Ali Khademhosseini: Biomaterials, soft robotics and the Terasaki Institute
Marwa ElDiwiny
26 Jan 2021
Interesting discussion with Prof. Ali Khademhosseini, CEO of the Terasaki Institute, and one of the pioneers of the Bioengineering field. Prof. Ali’s journey from Harvard and UCLA to the Terasaki In...
Designing customized “brains” for robots
MIT News
25 Jan 2021
By Daniel Ackerman
Contemporary robots can move quickly. “The motors are fast, and they’re powerful,” says Sabrina Neuman.
Yet in complex situations, like interactions with people, rob...
Self-supervised learning of visual appearance solves fundamental problems of optical flow
Guido de Croon
19 Jan 2021
Flying insects as inspiration to AI for small drones
How do honeybees land on flowers or avoid obstacles? One would expect such questions to be mostly of interest to biologists. However, the rise o...
How to keep drones flying when a motor fails
NCCR Robotics
14 Jan 2021
Robotics researchers at the University of Zurich show how onboard cameras can be used to keep damaged quadcopters in the air and flying stably – even without GPS....
IEEE RAS Soft Robotics Podcast with Hod Lipson: Can we design self-aware robots?
Marwa ElDiwiny
13 Jan 2021
Interesting discussion with Hod Lipson, head of Creative Machines Lab, Columbia University in New York. Can robots be self-aware? Can they design other robots and self-repair? Why should we evolve rob...
#CYBATHLON2020GlobalEdition winners of the powered leg prosthesis race (with interview)
Daniel Carrillo-Zapata
10 Jan 2021
Finishing this series of CYBATHLON 2020 winners, today we feature the victory of the startup Circleg from Switzerland. We also had the chance to interview them (see the end of this post)....
Science Magazine robot videos 2020
Daniel Carrillo-Zapata
06 Jan 2021
Did you manage to watch all the holiday robot videos of 2020? If you did but are still hungry for more, I have prepared this compilation of Science Magazine videos featuring robotics research that wer...
Carlotta Berry’s talk – Robotics Education to Robotics Research (with video)
Robotics Today
22 Dec 2020
A few days ago, Robotics Today hosted an online seminar with Professor Carlotta Berry from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. In her talk, Carlotta presented the multidisciplinary benefits of ro...
