During the final fight scene of the 2011 film Real Steel, two giant robots battle it out in a boxing ring—and the underdog is losing. Before the final round, Hugh Jackman’s character, Charlie, takes his robot aside and tells it to watch him and follow his lead from the sidelines. The final round commences, Charlie […]
The early forays to the moon employed throwaway technologies, designed to function during the two-week period of lunar daylight, then to perish in the freeze of the equally long night. But to sustain a colony, everything must be made to survive deathly extremes. During daytime, lunar temperatures can reach 120 °C at the equator. At […]
This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Researchers at the Small Artifacts Lab (SMART LAB) at the University of Maryland have been working on a small wearable robot called Calico. Weighing just 18 grams, the robot […]
Calling all robot fanatics! We are the creators of the Robots Guide, IEEE’s interactive site about robotics, and we need your help. Today, we’re expanding our massive catalog to nearly 250 robots, and we want your opinion to decide which are the coolest, most wanted, and also creepiest robots out there. To submit your votes, […]
In industry, it’s pretty common for robots to be sold as a service. That is, rather than buying the robot and managing it yourself, you instead rent the service that the robot provides. This service includes renting the robot itself, but it also includes stuff like installation, maintenance, repairs, tech support, software updates, and all […]
This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore. When a patient has a blocked artery or blood vessel, a team of surgeons must carefully thread an ultrathin catheter through the person’s blood vessel to reach the lesion or blocked area. But whereas surgeons must estimate the position […]
This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore. When creating robots, it can be challenging to achieve the right combination of qualities, which sometimes contradict one another. For example, it’s difficult to make a robot that is both flexible and strong—but not impossible. In a recent study, […]
The Big Picture features technology through the lens of photographers. Every month, IEEE Spectrum selects the most stunning technology images recently captured by photographers around the world. We choose images that reflect an important advance, or a trend, or that are just mesmerizing to look at. We feature all images on our site, and one […]
While being able to drive the ball 300 yards might get the fans excited, a solid putting game is often what separates a golf champion from the journeymen. A robot built by German researchers is quickly becoming a master of this short game using a clever combination of classical control engineering and machine learning. In […]
IROS 2022 took place in Kyoto last week, bringing together thousands of roboticists from around the world to share all the latest awesome research they’ve been working on. We’ve got a bunch of stuff to bring you from the conference, but while we work on that (and recover from some monster jetlag), here are the […]