Robotics, AI and SmartTech News – Latest Headlines

Orchestration of systems of mobile robots for border protection, search and rescue, and personal security

New research enables the efficient planning of the activities of systems of mobile robots for socially beneficial services including border patrol, search and rescue, and security escort.

March 7, 2016 Read more

Super elastic electroluminescent skin will soon create mood robots

Imagine a health care robot that could display the patient's temperature and pulse, and even reacts to a patient's mood.

March 3, 2016 Read more

How to tame your robot

Now programming robots is not just for those with years of coding knowledge, it's for anyone who wants to experience what it's like to simply wave at a robot and have it wave back.

March 1, 2016 Read more

In emergencies, should you trust a robot? (w/video)

In emergencies, people may trust robots too much for their own safety, a new study suggests.

February 29, 2016 Read more

Automatic programming makes swarm robots safer and more reliable

Researchers have applied a novel method of automatically programming and controlling a swarm of up to 600 robots to complete a specified set of tasks simultaneously.

February 25, 2016 Read more

Using stories to teach human values to artificial agents

Artificial intelligence technique Quixote teaches 'value alignment' to robots by training them to read stories, learn acceptable sequences of events and understand successful ways to behave in human societies.

February 13, 2016 Read more

Robotically driven system could reduce cost of discovering drug and target interactions

Scientists have created the first robotically driven experimentation system to determine the effects of a large number of drugs on many proteins, reducing the number of necessary experiments by 70%.

February 9, 2016 Read more

Cockroach inspires robot that squeezes through cracks (w/video)

Cockroaches' ability to squeeze through the tiniest cracks has inspired a robot that can rapidly squeeze through cracks - a new capability for search-and-rescue in rubble resulting from tornados, earthquakes and explosions.

February 9, 2016 Read more

Robotic fingers with a gentle touch

Scientists have invented a new soft gripper that uses electroadhesion: flexible electrode flaps that act like a thumb-index duo. It can pick up fragile objects of arbitrary shape and stiffness, like an egg, a water balloon or paper.

February 1, 2016 Read more

Half million dollar Robotic Art Grand Challenge seeks technologists to build a classical artist

In the tradition of recent Technological Grand Challenges, RobotArt has pledged over half a million dollars in prizes over 5 years to competitors in a new Robotic Grand Challenge. This Grand Challenge is simple to describe but difficult to master, create a robot that paints with a brush like a classical master. The more skilled and creative the robot, the better.

January 27, 2016 Read more

NIST launches national competition to make robots more agile

Manufacturers, robot suppliers and researchers, here's your chance to get in on the ground floor of an upcoming national competition intended to help make robots handier and nimbler performers on the factory floor.

January 21, 2016 Read more

Microbots individually controlled using 'mini force fields'

Researchers are using a technology likened to 'mini force fields' to independently control individual microrobots operating within groups, an advance aimed at using the tiny machines in areas including manufacturing and medicine.

January 12, 2016 Read more

Robot scientists discuss European research road maps

From 12 to 15 January, about 100 leaders from science and industry come to University of Twente's campus to discuss public-private partnerships in robotics. At the end of the week, there will be the kick-off of an innovative project, led by UT, about robots that will improve biopsy for cancer diagnostics.

January 11, 2016 Read more

Robots learn by watching how-to videos

Researchers are teaching robots to watch instructional videos and derive a series of step-by-step instructions to perform a task. You won't even have to turn on the DVD player; the robot can look up what it needs on YouTube.

December 18, 2015 Read more

Continuous adaptation makes for more natural interactions between robots and humans in shared tasks

A robot's role in a shared task could be continuously adjusted during the activity, thanks to a new adaptive robot control system that can sense whether a human operator wants to lead or follow.

December 16, 2015 Read more

Improved robotic testing systems

New mathematical models can give us better and cheaper robotic systems.

December 14, 2015 Read more

Roboticists learn to teach robots from babies

A collaboration between University of Washington developmental psychologists and computer scientists has demonstrated that robots can 'learn' much like kids - by amassing data through exploration, watching a human perform a task and determining how best to carry out that task on its own.

December 1, 2015 Read more

Computer scientists achieve breakthrough in pheromone-based swarm communications in robots (w/video)

An innovative, effective and low-cost system which replicates in robots the pheromone-based communication of insect swarms is now being made available to robotics and artificial intelligence researchers after an important breakthrough.

November 26, 2015 Read more