In terms of human features that robots are probably the most jealous of, fingers have to be right up there with eyeballs and brains. Our fleshy little digits have a crazy amount of dexterity relative to their size, and so many sensors packed into them that allow you to manipulate complex objects sight unseen. Obviously, […]
The parent company of robot vacuum maker Neato Robotics, Germany’s Vorwerk Group, announced late last week that a broad restructuring of its robotics division will result in the closure of Neato and the end of the Neato product line. Vorwerk is promising five years of parts and service availability, along with enough software support to […]
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Robotics Summit & Expo: 10–11 May 2023, BOSTON ICRA 2023: 29 May–2 June 2023, LONDON […]
Without a lifetime of experience to build on like humans have (and totally take for granted), robots that want to learn a new skill often have to start from scratch. Reinforcement learning is a technique that lets robots learn new skills through trial and error, but especially in the case of learning end-to-end vision based […]
In the realm of artificial intelligence, bigger is supposed to be better. Neural networks with billions of parameters power everyday AI-based tools like ChatGPT and Dall-E, and each new large language model (LLM) edges out its predecessors in size and complexity. Meanwhile, at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a group of researchers […]
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Robotics Summit & Expo: 10–11 May 2023, BOSTON ICRA 2023: 29 May–2 June 2023, LONDON […]
Now that anyone, anywhere can get themselves a quadrupedal robot without having to apply for a major research grant, we’re seeing all kinds of fun research being done with our four-legged electromechanical friends. And by “fun research” I mean very serious research that is making valuable contributions towards practical robotics. But seriously, there are lots […]
Robots are not ready for the real world. It’s still an achievement for autonomous robots to merely survive in the real world, which is a long way from any kind of useful generalized autonomy. Under some fairly specific constraints, autonomous robots are starting to find a few valuable niches in semistructured environments, like offices and […]
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Robotics Summit & Expo: 10–11 May 2023, BOSTON ICRA 2023: 29 May–2 June 2023, LONDON […]
JPL’s Ingenuity helicopter is preparing for the 50th flight of its 5-flight mission to Mars. Flight 49, which took place last weekend, was its fastest and highest yet—the little helicopter flew 282 meters at an altitude of 16 meters, reaching a top speed of 6.50 meters per second. Not a bad performance for a tech […]