Robotics news

Robotics

Engineers teach a quadruped robot to climb standard ladders

A team of robotics engineers at ETH Zurich, Robotics Systems Lab, has modified an ANYbotics ANYMal quadruped robot to allow it to easily and effectively climb a standard ladder. The group has written a paper describing their ...

Robotics

Meet Plantolin, the tree-planting robot pangolin built by student

A robot pangolin designed to plant trees is the winner of the 2023 Natural Robotics Contest, which rewards robot designs inspired by nature. As the winning entry, the pangolin—dubbed "Plantolin"—has been brought to life ...

Robotics

Using Turing patterns to enhance soft pneumatic technology

According to a recent study in Scientific Reports, Turing patterns can be used to develop a new method for designing and producing fabric-based soft pneumatic actuators (FSPAs).

Robotics

LiDAR-based system allows unmanned aerial vehicle team to rapidly reconstruct environments

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, have proved to be highly effective systems for monitoring and exploring environments. These autonomous flying robots could also be used to create detailed maps and ...

Robotics

Q&A: Teaching robots to touch and interact like humans

Robots are widely used in the automotive industry and have started entering new application domains such as logistics in the last few years. However, current robots still face many limitations. They typically perform a single ...

Robotics

Team develops versatile knee exoskeletons for safer lifting

A set of knee exoskeletons, built with commercially available knee braces and drone motors at the University of Michigan, has been shown to help counteract fatigue in lifting and carrying tasks. They helped users maintain ...

Robotics

Teaching robots to use color in moving objects

Research at Michigan State University is focused on teaching robots to use colors to perceive, visualize, and interpret interactions when manipulating objects. A force-interpreting optical system is being developed so robots ...

Robotics

Versatile microscale robots can fold into 3D shapes and crawl

Cornell University researchers have created microscale robots less than 1 millimeter in size that are printed as a 2D hexagonal "metasheet," but with a jolt of electricity, morph into preprogrammed 3D shapes and crawl.

Robotics

Amazon's 'collaborative' robots offer peek into the future

Hundreds of orange robots zoom and whiz back and forth like miniature bumper cars—but instead of colliding, they're following a carefully plotted path to transport thousands of items ordered from online giant Amazon.

Robotics

Brain-inspired artificial intelligence in robots

Research groups at KAIST, the University of Cambridge, Japan's National Institute for Information and Communications Technology, and Google DeepMind argue that our understanding of how humans make intelligent decisions has ...

Robotics

Robots may run future farms, researchers say

Agriculture, one of the world's oldest vocations, is also one that continues to reinvent itself with new technology. From the introduction of the steel plow to automated tractors to modern fertilizer applications, technology ...

Robotics

The first walking robot that moves without GPS

Desert ants are extraordinary solitary navigators. Researchers at CNRS and Aix-Marseille University, in the Institut des Sciences du Mouvement—Étienne Jules Marey (ISM), were inspired by ants as they designed AntBot, the ...

Robotics

Rent-a-robot for laundry help? That's the plan in Japan

Japan-based startup Mira Robotics has some statistics in mind. By 2035, said the company, 1 in 3 Japanese citizens will be elderly. Other parts of the globe will be facing low birthrates and aging populations too. Mira Robotics ...

Robotics

MIT robot combines vision and touch to learn the game of Jenga

In the basement of MIT's Building 3, a robot is carefully contemplating its next move. It gently pokes at a tower of blocks, looking for the best block to extract without toppling the tower, in a solitary, slow-moving, yet ...

Robotics

Engineers program marine robots to take calculated risks

We know far less about the Earth's oceans than we do about the surface of the moon or Mars. The sea floor is carved with expansive canyons, towering seamounts, deep trenches, and sheer cliffs, most of which are considered ...