Robotics

Imagine AI-controlled robots that organize themselves into different groups, or across groups—and that reorganize themselves and make new plans when needed. This kind of flexibility can enable robots to effectively solve different types of tasks as a team.... Read more

Researchers at Northwestern University and Israel's Tel Aviv University have overcome a major barrier to achieving a low-cost solution for advanced robotic touch. The authors argue that the problem that has been lurking in the margins of many papers about touch sensors lies in the robotic skin itself.... Read more

Digital twins are a rapidly advancing area in engineering, going beyond static models to continuously receive data from the physical world and make predictions that go on to affect that reality. They have applications in areas such as energy systems, manufacturing and medicine. U-M's Automotive Research Center (ARC) uses them... Read more

Delivery robots made by companies such as Starship Technologies and Kiwibot autonomously make their way along city streets and through neighborhoods.... Read more

Recent advances in robotics and machine learning have enabled the automation of many real-world tasks, including various manufacturing and industrial processes. Among other applications, robotic and artificial intelligence (AI) systems have been successfully used to automate some steps in manufacturing clothes.... Read more

Many robotic applications rely on robotic arms or hands to handle different types of objects. Estimating the pose of such hand-held objects is an important yet challenging task in robotics, computer vision and even in augmented reality (AR) applications. A promising direction is to utilize multi-modal data, such as color... Read more

Trees, vegetation, rocks, unpredictable terrain and the lack of clearly defined roads—or roads at all—won't stop an autonomous, off-road vehicle developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute.... Read more

Fish are masters of coordinated motion. Schools of fish have no leader, yet individuals manage to stay in formation, avoid collisions, and respond with liquid flexibility to changes in their environment. Reproducing this combination of robustness and flexibility has been a long-standing challenge for human-engineered systems like robots.... Read more

For delivery robots, not all sidewalks are created equal—some are uneven or clogged with people and bus shelters—so researchers at Cornell Tech developed a "robotability score" and rated every street in New York City on how hospitable it would be to robots.... Read more

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, have already proved to be valuable tools for a wide range of applications, ranging from film and entertainment production to defense and security, agriculture, logistics, construction and environmental monitoring. While these technologies are already widely used in many countries worldwide, engineers have... Read more

Tracking thousands of products in massive warehouses presents a logistical nightmare for many businesses. To address this, Kennesaw State University assistant professor Jian Zhang has introduced an autonomous robot that can log inventory.... Read more

At a time when we run ourselves ragged to meet society's expectations of productivity, performance and time optimization, is it right that our robot vacuum cleaners and other smart appliances should sit idle for most of the day?... Read more

Researchers have created a light-powered soft robot that can carry loads through the air along established tracks, similar to cable cars or aerial trams. The soft robot operates autonomously, can climb slopes at angles of up to 80 degrees, and can carry loads up to 12 times its weight.... Read more

A team of roboticists at Tsinghua University, working with a trio of colleagues from Beihang University, all in China, has designed a new type of microrobot that can continuously transform its shape and "lock" into specific configurations. In their paper published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, the group describes... Read more

To build the experimental stations of the future, scientists at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory, are learning from some of the challenges that face them today. As light source technologies and capabilities... Read more