Each of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge teams is allowed to bring up to 20 people to the Louisville Mega Cavern for the final event. Of those 20 people, only five can accompany the robots to the course staging area to set up the robots. And of those five, just one person can be what DARPA […]
This article is part of our special report on AI, “The Great AI Reckoning.” “I should probably not be standing this close,” I think to myself, as the robot slowly approaches a large tree branch on the floor in front of me. It’s not the size of the branch that makes me nervous—it’s that the […]
The preliminary rounds of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge Finals are kicking off today. It’s been a little bit since the last DARPA SubT event—the Urban Circuit squeaked through right before the pandemic hit back in February of 2020, and the in-person Cave Circuit originally scheduled for later that year was canceled. So if it’s been […]
This is it! This week, we’re at the DARPA SubTerranean Challenge Finals in Louisville KY, where more than two dozen Systems Track and Virtual Track teams will compete for millions of dollars in prize money and being able to say “we won a DARPA challenge,” which is of course priceless. We’ve been following SubT for […]
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. 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!): DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA […]
While Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid spends its time learning how to dance and do parkour, the company’s Spot quadruped is quietly getting much better at doing useful, valuable tasks in commercial environments. Solving tasks like dynamic path planning and door manipulation in a way that’s robust enough that someone can buy your robot and not […]
Robotics, prosthetics, and other engineering applications routinely use actuators that imitate the contraction of animal muscles. However, the speed and efficiency of natural muscle fibers is a demanding benchmark. Despite new developments in actuation technologies, for the most past artificial muscles are either too large, too slow, or too weak. Recently, a team of engineers […]
Reeling from a crushing shortage of semiconductor chips for vehicles, carmakers also face another looming crisis: producing enough batteries to drive the global pivot towards electric vehicles. The supply of metals like cobalt, copper, lithium, and nickel needed for batteries is already shaky, and soaring demand for the hundreds of millions of batteries in the […]
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. 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!): DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA […]
The power that computer vision has gained over the last decade or so has been astonishing. Thanks to machine learning techniques applied to large datasets of images and video, it’s now much easier for robots to recognize (if not exactly understand) the world around them, and take intelligent (or at least significantly less unintelligent) actions […]