Wheeling its way between dining booths at a neon-lit restaurant in Pakistan’s Karachi megacity, a robot waitress drops off a fresh pizza to a waiting family.
In an emergency, a human might someday ask a robotic assistant to fetch a wall-mounted defibrillator located down the hall. But if the robot has incorrectly labeled the defibrillator as a fire extinguisher in its stored memory, it may not know where to find the lifesaving device.
Scuba diving places heavy demands on the human body. Divers must constantly overcome water resistance while carrying breathing equipment and other gear, and their underwater time is ultimately limited by both physical endurance and the amount of breathing gas they can carry.
When a doctor taps just below your kneecap, your lower leg kicks forward automatically. This knee-jerk reflex is one example of the reflexes that play an essential role in human motor control. Now, researchers at Tohoku University have developed a reflex module for musculoskeletal robots that works without electronic sensors or circuits. Using this module, the team reproduced the knee-jerk reflex in a robot and generated bipedal walking.
Manipulating an object with one hand is a balancing act. Fingers must release and renew their grip while keeping the object from slipping away, even with the palm facing downward.
A genetically optimized fuzzy logic controller for robotic arms is described in the International Journal of Automation and Control. The system improves accuracy and resilience in simulations of a three-degree-of-freedom robotic arm. Moreover, it outperforms alternative control systems when the device is exposed to disturbances and changes in the system parameters.
For more than a hundred years, quadcopters have been built according to the same basic principle. Four arms, each with a propeller, extend from a rigid central body. This design is ideal for precise, agile flight, but it has one major weakness—the drones are highly sensitive to unexpected contact with their surroundings. If they bump into a wall or another obstacle, they can become destabilized or even break apart.
A humanoid AI system has been developed that learns jointly from separately collected locomotion and object-manipulation data to perform multiple stages of a task in sequence.
Dozens of robots took on more than 3,000 steps up one of China’s most famous peaks Monday, carrying eggs and watermelons in a race organizers billed as a test of real-world machine endurance, state media showed.
A moth-shaped robot used an artificial circulatory system to deliver chemical building blocks through its body and grow a light sensor where UV light struck.