Robotics

Imagine a physician attempting to reach a cancerous nodule deep within a patient's lung—a target the size of a pea, hidden behind a maze of critical blood vessels and airways that shift with every breath. Straying one millimeter off course could puncture a major artery, and falling short could mean... Read more

A robot trained on videos of surgeries performed a lengthy phase of a gallbladder removal without human help. The robot operated for the first time on a lifelike patient, and during the operation, responded to and learned from voice commands from the team—like a novice surgeon working with a mentor.... Read more

As waiting rooms fill up, doctors get increasingly burned out, and surgeries take longer to schedule and more get canceled, humanoid surgical robots offer a solution. That's the argument that UC San Diego robotics expert Michael Yip makes in a perspective piece in Science Robotics.... Read more

Conventional robots, like those used in industry and hazardous environments, are easy to model and control, but are too rigid to operate in confined spaces and uneven terrain. Soft, bio-inspired robots are far better at adapting to their environments and maneuvering in otherwise inaccessible places.... Read more

Oblivious to the punishing midday heat, a wheeled robot powered by the sun and infused with artificial intelligence carefully combs a cotton field in California, plucking out weeds.... Read more

Scientists are striving to discover new semiconductor materials that could boost the efficiency of solar cells and other electronics. But the pace of innovation is bottlenecked by the speed at which researchers can manually measure important material properties.... Read more

The more we interact with robots, the more human we perceive them to become—according to new research from the University of East Anglia, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.... Read more

The future of moon exploration may be rolling around a nondescript office on the CU Boulder campus. Here, a robot about as wide as a large pizza scoots forward on three wheels. It uses an arm with a claw at one end to pick up a plastic block from the... Read more

A new imaging technique developed by MIT researchers could enable quality-control robots in a warehouse to peer through a cardboard shipping box and see that the handle of a mug buried under packing peanuts is broken.... Read more

From delivering food in restaurants to cleaning airports, robots are becoming increasingly common in society—but are our policies ready to keep up?... Read more

While so far robots have predominantly been deployed individually, as teams, they can tackle a wider range of complex missions with remarkable speed and efficiency. For instance, they could help to rapidly transport objects to target locations, moving on varying terrains and perhaps even passing through environments that are difficult... Read more

The drone industry has landed after a long flight to the implementation of drone traffic management.... Read more

Diffusion models like OpenAI's DALL-E are becoming increasingly useful in helping brainstorm new designs. Humans can prompt these systems to generate an image, create a video, or refine a blueprint, and come back with ideas they hadn't considered before.... Read more

Robotic systems have the potential to greatly enhance daily living for the over one billion individuals worldwide who experience some form of disability. Brain-computer interfaces or BCIs present a compelling option by enabling direct communication between the brain and external devices, bypassing traditional muscle-based control.... Read more

Inspired by a simple children's toy, a jumping popper toy, researchers have unlocked a key to designing more agile and predictable soft robots. Soft robots, made from flexible materials, hold immense promise for delicate tasks, but their complex movements have been difficult to predict and control, especially dynamic actions like... Read more