The dawn of the robot revolution is already here, and it is not the dystopian nightmare we imagined. Instead, it comes in the form of social robots: Autonomous robots in homes and schools, offices and public spaces, able to interact with humans and other robots in a socially acceptable, human-perceptible way to resolve tasks related to core human […]
Demand for battery-making metals is projected to soar as more of the world’s cars, buses, and ships run on electricity. The coming mining boom is raising concerns of environmental damage and labor abuses—and it’s driving a search for more sustainable ways of making batteries and cutting-edge electronics. Artificial intelligence could help improve the way battery […]
In my experience, there are three different types of consumer drone pilots. You’ve got people for whom drones are a tool for taking pictures and video, where flying the drone is more or less just a necessary component of that. You’ve also got people who want a drone that can be used to take pictures […]
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!): HRI 2021 – March 8-11, 2021 – [Online Conference] RoboSoft 2021 – April 12-16, 2021 – [Online Conference] […]
Now that DeepMind has taught AI to master the game of Go—and furthered its advantage in chess—they’ve turned their attention to another board game: Diplomacy. Unlike Go, it is seven-player, it requires a combination of competition and cooperation, and on each turn players make moves simultaneously, so they must reason about what others are reasoning about them, and […]
Over the last half decade or so, the commercialization of autonomous robots that can operate outside of structured environments has dramatically increased. But this relatively new transition of robotic technologies from research projects to commercial products comes with its share of challenges, many of which relate to the rapidly increasing visibility that these robots have […]
When a natural disaster strikes, first responders must move quickly to search for survivors. To support the search-and-rescue efforts, one group of innovators in Europe has succeeded in harnessing the power of drones, AI, and smartphones, all in one novel combination. Their idea is to use a single drone as a moving cellular base station, […]
At a press conference this afternoon, NASA released a new video showing, in real-time and full color, the entire descent and landing of the Perseverance Mars rover. The video begins with the deployment of the parachute, and ends with the Skycrane cutting the rover free and flying away. It’s the most mind-blowing three minutes of […]
Inspecting old mines is a dangerous business. For humans, mines can be lethal: prone to rockfalls and filled with noxious gases. Robots can go where humans might suffocate, but even robots can only do so much when mines are inaccessible from the surface. Now, researchers in the UK, led by Headlight AI, have developed a […]
Soft robots are inherently safe, highly resilient, and potentially very cheap, making them promising for a wide array of applications. But development on them has been a bit slow relative to other areas of robotics, at least partially because soft robots can’t directly benefit from the massive increase in computing power and sensor and actuator availability that […]