Articles

New walking robot design could revolutionize how we build things in space

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Image: Shutterstock.com By Suzanna Burgelman, Frontiers science writer Researchers have designed a state-of-the-art walking robot that could revolutionize large construction projects in space. They tested the feasibility of the robot for the in-space assembly of a 25m Large Aperture Space Telescope. They present their findings in Frontiers in Robotics and AI. A scaled-down prototype of …

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A new type of material called a mechanical neural network can learn and change its physical properties to create adaptable, strong structures

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This connection of springs is a new type of material that can change shape and learn new properties. Jonathan Hopkins, CC BY-ND By Ryan H. Lee (PhD Student in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles) A new type of material can learn and improve its ability to deal with unexpected forces thanks …

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MiGriBot: a miniature robot able to perform pick-and-place operations of sub-millimeter objects

Articles, c-Research-Innovation, Manipulation / By

Research team : Maxence LEVEZIEL, Wissem HAOUAS, Michaël GAUTHIER, Guillaume J. LAURENT, Redwan DAHMOUCHE. By Redwan Dahmouche Speed and precision are two major issues in robotics and in Industry of the Future (also known as Industry 4.0). Within this framework, RoMoCo research team of AS2M department at FEMTO-ST Institute has developed MiGriBot, a miniature robot …

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Bees’ ‘waggle dance’ may revolutionize how robots talk to each other in disaster zones

Articles, bio-inspired, c-Research-Innovation / By

Image credit: rtbilder / Shutterstock.com By Conn Hastings, science writer Honeybees use a sophisticated dance to tell their sisters about the location of nearby flowers. This phenomenon forms the inspiration for a form of robot-robot communication that does not rely on digital networks. A recent study presents a simple technique whereby robots view and interpret …

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Seamless transitions between autonomous robot capabilities and human intervention in construction robotics

Articles, c-Research-Innovation / By

Congratulations to the winners of the best paper award of the International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction 2021. The team around Cynthia Brosque, Elena Galbally, Prof. Martin Fischer, and Prof. Oussama Khatib did excellent groundwork for construction robotics. With permission, Silicon Valley Robotics is reposting the first parts of the paper below. It …

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Robotic cubes shapeshift in outer space

Articles, c-Research-Innovation, modular / By

MIT PhD student Martin Nisser tests self-reconfiguring robot blocks, or ElectroVoxels, in microgravity. Photo: Steve Boxall/ZeroG By Rachel Gordon | MIT CSAIL If faced with the choice of sending a swarm of full-sized, distinct robots to space, or a large crew of smaller robotic modules, you might want to enlist the latter. Modular robots, like …

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Happy Birthday Nao!

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NAO robot. Image credits: Stephen Chin on Flickr [CC BY 2.0] Created by the French company ‘Aldebaran Robotics’ in 2008, and acquired by ‘Softbank Robotics Japan’ in 2015, NAO is an autonomous and programmable humanoid robot that has been successfully applied to research and development applications for children and adults. More than 13,000 NAO robots …

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Robot reinforcement learning: safety in real-world applications

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How can we make a robot learn in the real world while ensuring safety? In this work, we show how it’s possible to face this problem. The key idea to exploit domain knowledge and use the constraint definition to our advantage. Following our approach, it’s possible to implement learning robotic agents that can explore and …

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Team builds first living robots that can reproduce

Articles, bio-inspired, c-Research-Innovation, Micro / By

AI-designed (C-shaped) organisms push loose stem cells (white) into piles as they move through their environment. Credit: Douglas Blackiston and Sam Kriegman By Joshua Brown, University of Vermont Communications To persist, life must reproduce. Over billions of years, organisms have evolved many ways of replicating, from budding plants to sexual animals to invading viruses. Now …

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