Tag Archives: Research

If you have sex with an android doll and then knock it around the room, are you being abusive? If you’re in a foul mood and boot your robotic pet down the stairs, are you being a jerk? In either scenario, is the device’s owner culpable of bad behavior?  The questions may sound insincere, but a U.S. bioethicist submits that they ...

Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a tiny robot that mimics the movement of a starfish larva. It is driven by sound waves and equipped with tiny hairs that direct the fluid around it, just like its natural model. In the future, such microswimmers could deliver drugs to diseased cells with pinpoint accuracy. Among scientists, there is great interest in ...

Auroral activity on Earth varies over time. As the magnetic poles drift, auroras can appear at different latitudes around the globe. Solar activity also affects them, with powerful solar storms pushing the auroras further into mid-latitudes. In an effort to better understand how auroras move around, how they’ll move in the future, and when powerful solar storms might pose a ...

New research shows that the benefits people could reap from exoskeletons rely heavily on having time to train with the device. Exoskeleton devices work, researchers say, for a variety of uses such as speeding up our walking or making running easier. Yet they don’t know what exactly makes exoskeletons effective. What is the benefit of customization, for example? And how much does simply ...

Autonomous driving is the next big thing! It has attracted enormous attention, and this interest has also grown with companies like Google and Apple entering this segment of the global market. Image credit: Free-Photos cia Pixabay (Free Pixabay licence) Challenge with a Self-Driving Car Real-world traffic environments pose unique challenges due to their high dimensionality and the complexity of modeling ...

While much research related to robotic autonomy is done for controlled environments, many practical applications include venturing into unknown territories and successfully navigating them. Autonomous navigation for robots in unfamiliar territories is an area of broad interest for researchers. Its vast applications range from rover navigation on Mars to self-driving cars. Image credit: Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0) ...