Tag Archives: robotics

How soon do you think you will encounter an autonomous robot in your day-to-day life?  The question of trust between robots and humans will have to become the basis of the entire social robotics. Image credit: epSos.de via Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0) If your answer was not “never”, you probably expect human-robot interaction to start happening soon & its frequency ...

A new control system, demonstrated using MIT’s robotic mini cheetah, enables four-legged robots to jump across uneven terrain in real-time. A loping cheetah dashes across a rolling field, bounding over sudden gaps in the rugged terrain. The movement may look effortless, but getting a robot to move this way is an altogether different prospect. In recent years, four-legged robots inspired ...

Mapping the 3D volume of an environment during online operation is necessary for tasks like autonomous navigation or mobile manipulation. However, these measurements are affected by sensor noise and pose estimation errors. Volumetric Mapping technique is used in different fields, where image segmentation or other types of image processing are required. Image credit: Toorumer via Wikimedia, CC-BY-SA-4.0 A recent study ...

The name of Boston Dynamics has been already well-established in the world of companies that develop and manufacture robots. In fact, Boston Dynamics is also one of the most innovative engineering ventures relentlessly improving their existing designs while also pursuing new and more radical innovative ideas. Spot – one of the most famous creations from Boston Dynamics. Image credit: CNBC ...

This robot is unusual. There are many robotic models that are capable of traversing different and difficult types of terrain. This one, however, aptly combines several skills: walking, flying, skateboarding and even slacklining. LEONARDO robot in a flight mode. Image credit: Veritasium (screen from YouTube video) Seeing robots around is not surprising anymore – just think about drones or robotic ...

The interactions with objects in our world are possible because of physical contact. Its simulation is an indispensable yet difficult task for robotics researchers. DeepMind has recently announced making the MuJoCo physics simulator freely available. Image credit: MuJoCo MuJoCo stands for Multi-Joint Dynamics with Contact. It accurately and efficiently captures the salient features of contacting objects. While other simulators sometimes ...

“Robotic” textiles could help performers and athletes train their breathing, and potentially help patients recovering from postsurgery breathing changes. The key features of the new fiber architecture include its extremely narrow size and use of inexpensive materials, which make it relatively easy to structure the fibers into a variety of fabric forms. Credits: Courtesy of the researchers / MIT A ...

Lots of learning algorithms have been created to solve robot manipulation problems (such as robotic stacking) with a large and diverse set of objects. However, most of them focused on tasks like grasping that do not typically require complex inter-object contact dynamics. An industrial robot. Machines like this are used to perform robotic stacking operations in a variety of industrial ...

Reinforcement learning algorithms are commonly used for narrowly defined tasks. In contrast, humans plan their actions using a mental model of the world’s physical structure. Inspired by human intelligence, a recent paper proposes an environment that is designed as a sandbox where the agent has to learn about how a physical world works. Illustration of the problem setup for modeling ...

Stan Schaar, who lost his left leg in an accident while helping a neighbor, never thought he would again feel the sensation of effortlessly walking with two healthy legs. Then he slipped on a new experimental exoskeleton developed by mechanical engineers at the University of Utah’s Bionic Engineering Lab. “It just felt like a big wind was behind me, pushing me ...