Robots tagged posts

3D-printable material can heal the body, build better robots and recover critical minerals

3D-printable material can heal the body, build better robots and recover critical minerals
Credit: University of Texas at Austin

A new type of 3D-printable material developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin mimics human tissue’s ability to sort and filter, allowing certain molecules to pass through while keeping others out. This broad functionality means the material can be used in a variety of applications across medicine, water and robotics.

Current methods for building small tissue-like materials don’t scale to sizes that can make applications possible, the researchers say. The team overcame these issues of speed and scalability by jamming billions of tiny water droplets tightly together using simple mixing and centrifuge techniques to form large, tissue-like materials in just a few minutes...

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Bio-inspired chip helps robots and self-driving cars react faster to movement

Bio-inspired chip helps robots and self-driving cars react faster to movement
Neuromorphic motion extraction hardware and its application. Credit: Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-68659-y

Robots and self-driving cars could soon benefit from a new kind of brain-inspired hardware that can allegedly detect movement and react faster than a human. A new study published in the journal Nature Communications details how an international team built their neuromorphic temporal-attention hardware system to speed up automated driving decisions.

The problem with current robotic vision and self-driving vehicles is a significant delay in processing what they see. While today’s top AI programs can recognize objects accurately, the calculations are so complex that they can take up to half a second to complete...

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Nature-inspired navigation system helps robots traverse complex environments without GPS

A bio-inspired system could enhance robot navigation in real-world environments
Performance of the insect-inspired navigation component. The graph shows the AntBot- inspired Spiking Neural Network (red) maintaining a significantly lower positional drift over time compared to conventional Visual-Inertial Odometry (blue) in a challenging desert environment. Credit: (2025). DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.5674916

Robots could soon be able to autonomously complete search and rescue missions, inspections, complex maintenance operations and various other real-world tasks. To do this, however, they should be able to smoothly navigate unknown and complex environments without breaking down or getting stuck, which would require human intervention.

Most autonomous navigation systems rely on global positioning systems (GPS), which can provide information about where a robot is located ...

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Robots team up to explore planetary lava caves

Robot team used during the Lanzarote field trial along with scale bar. (A) Heterogeneous robot team. (B) Robot capabilities and used materials. Credit: Science Robotics (2025). DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adj9699

In the not-too-distant future, the search for signs of life on Mars and the moon could see the next generation of robots exploring a new frontier: subsurface lava tubes. These missions could also help us determine the best locations for establishing human bases.

To see whether this could be feasible, scientists tested three autonomous robots in a lava cave on the Spanish island of Lanzarote.

Lava tubes are deep underground caves formed by volcanic activity and are found in various parts of the world, as well as on Mars and the moon...

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