Robots tagged posts

Intelligent robots are reshaping our universe. In New Jersey’s Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, AI-assisted robots are bringing a new level of security to doctors and patients by scanning every inch of the premises for harmful bacteria and viruses and disinfecting them with precise doses of germicidal ultraviolet light.

In agriculture, robotic arms driven by drones scan varying types of fruits and vegetables and determine when they are perfectly ripe for picking.

The Airspace Intelligence System AI Fly...

Plagues of locusts, containing millions of insects, fly across the sky to attack crops, but the individual insects do not collide with each other within these massive swarms. Now a team of engineers is creating a low-power collision detector that mimics the locust avoidance response and could help robots, drones and even self-driving cars avoid collisions.

“We are always looking for animals with unusual abilities, ones that do something better than humans,” said Saptarshi Das, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics...

Researchers have demonstrated how kirigami-inspired techniques allow them to design thin sheets of material that automatically reconfigure into new two-dimensional (2D) shapes and three-dimensional (3D) structures in response to environmental stimuli. The researchers created a variety of robotic devices as a proof of concept for the approach.

“This is the first case that we know of in which 2D kirigami patterns autonomously reshape themselves into distinct 3D structures without mechanical input,” says Jie Yin, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University and correspondi...

When fed 3-D models of household items in bird’s-eye view (left), a new algorithm is able to guess what the objects are, and what their overall 3-D shapes should be. This image shows the guess in the center, and the actual 3-D model on the right. Credit: Courtesy of Ben Burchfiel

Robots need to guess what they’re seeing better, even when parts are hidden from view. Autonomous robots can inspect nuclear power plants, clean up oil spills in the ocean, accompany fighter planes into combat and explore the surface of Mars. Yet for all their talents, robots still can’t make a cup of tea. That’s because tasks such as turning the stove on, fetching the kettle and finding the milk and sugar require perceptual abilities that, for most machines, are still a fantasy.

Among them is the ability to make ...