Academia / Research

Algorithm accepts or rejects each robot’s mission trajectory, depending on whether it increases or decreases the team’s objective function.

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge enters the homestretch as the final 8 teams are announced for the last competition event.

Carnegie Mellon University’s acclaimed snake-like robot can now slither its way underwater, allowing the modular robotics platform to inspect ships, submarines and infrastructure for damage. A team from the Biorobotics Lab in the School of Computer Science’s Robotics Institute tested the Hardened Underwater Modular Robot Snake (HUMRS) last month in the university’s pool, diving the…

MIT researchers have developed a robot that uses radio waves, which can pass through walls, to sense occluded objects. The robot, called RF-Grasp, combines this powerful sensing with more traditional computer vision to locate and grasp items that might otherwise be blocked from view. The advance could one day streamline e-commerce fulfillment in warehouses or…

Researchers studied how reinforcement learning enabled a robot arm equipped with a parallel jaw gripper and tactile sensors to insert unknown objects into a hole.

Many parcel delivery drones of the future are expected to handle packages weighing five pounds or less, a restriction that would allow small, standardized UAVs to handle a large percentage of the deliveries now done by ground vehicles. But will that relegate heavier packages to slower delivery by conventional trucks and vans? A research team…

There are some tasks traditional robots – the rigid and metallic kind – simply aren’t cut out for. Soft-bodied robots, on the other hand, may be able to interact with people more safely or slip into tight spaces with ease. But for robots to reliably complete their programmed duties, they need to know the whereabouts…

The University of Michigan (U-M) and Ford Motor Company today opened a $75 million, state-of-the-art robotics research center. The U-M Ford Motor Company Robotics Building brings together U-M researchers from 23 buildings and 10 top-10 programs. As the new hub of the U-M Robotics Institute, its first three floors hold U-M research labs for robots…

The robot uses a camera to see how rough the terrain is, and it uses sensors in the legs to feel how hard the walking surface is.

Robotics researchers are developing exoskeletons and prosthetic legs capable of making control decisions on their own using sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The system combines computer vision and deep learning to mimic how able-bodied people walk by seeing their surroundings and adjusting their movements. “We’re giving robotic exoskeletons vision so they can control themselves,” said…

New motion dataset offers object trajectories and corresponding 3D maps for over 100,000 segments, each 20 seconds long and mined for interesting interactions with cars, people, and more.

Exoskeleton users can now go from sitting to standing safely and without assistance based on the work of University of Michigan researchers, who developed an approach to create and test solutions to such problems virtually.

New soft actuator can flap nearly 500 times per second, giving drones insect-like resilience.

This quadruped developed at UCSD relies on a series of valves that open and close in a specific sequence to walk.

Cornell University researchers created a low-cost method for soft robots to detect a range of physical interactions, from pats to punches to hugs, without relying on touch at all. Instead, a USB camera located inside the robot captures the shadow movements of hand gestures on the robot’s skin and classifies them with machine-learning software. The…

Army-funded researchers discovered how to make materials capable of self-propulsion, allowing materials to move without motors or hands. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst discovered how to make materials that snap and reset themselves, only relying upon energy flow from their environment. This research could enable future military robots to move from their own energy. “This…

Contemporary robots can move quickly. “The motors are fast, and they’re powerful,” says Sabrina Neuman. Yet in complex situations, like interactions with people, robots often don’t move quickly. “The hang up is what’s going on in the robot’s head,” she adds. Perceiving stimuli and calculating a response takes a “boatload of computation,” which limits reaction…

For tens of thousands of students globally, over the last two decades, a part of their education involved an open-source software toolkit known as the Robotics Toolbox for MATLAB. This started as a modest collection of tools to help me in my PhD research in the early 1990s. It leveraged MATLAB, at that time a…

A new device that is 6 millimeters in diameter and 16 millimeters in length is capable of focusing and steering a fiber-delivered laser beam at high speeds.

Researchers said the optical neuromorphic processor could benefit autonomous vehicles and other data-intensive applications.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the finals of the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge will be held at the Louisville Mega Cavern in Louisville, Kentucky on September 21-23, 2021. The DARPA SubT Challenge is designed to test the ability of autonomous robots to perceive, navigate, network, and move in a variety of GPS-denied…

Predicting when and how collections of particles, robots, or animals become orderly remains a challenge across science and engineering. In the 19th century, scientists and engineers developed the discipline of statistical mechanics, which predicts how groups of simple particles transition between order and disorder, as when a collection of randomly colliding atoms freezes to form a…