The United States Army has announced plans to test robotic combat vehicles starting in March 2020 at Fort Carson in Colorado. During that time, soldiers will participate in an operational test of modified Bradley Fighting Vehicles (tanks) called Mission Enabler Technologies-Demonstrators (MET-Ds). The test will influence future autonomous vehicle projects conducted by the US Army.
Researchers at EPFL have developed a group of small robots that weigh only 10 grams each that are able to work as a group. The small robots are inspired by trap-jaw ants; individually, ants only have so much strength and intelligence. As a colony of ants, they can complete sophisticated tasks and evade larger predators.
When people talk about robots taking over humans' jobs, they're mostly talking about those robots that come in incorporeal, digital-only form. It's going to be a very long while before humanoid or even bipedal robot can pose a fictional threat to humans. They can't even walk on uneven terrain without toppling over. That has been one of the challenges of DARPA's contests and IHMC Robotics may have developed a way for the likes of Atlas and Valkyrie to learn how to step through treacherous land.
The Harvard Microrobotics Lab has announced the latest version of its insect-like RoboBee 'X-Wing' is officially the lightest vehicle to achieve sustained untethered flight. The solo flight milestone was recorded as a slow-motion video in which viewers see the tiny robot's wings flap rapidly, just like an ordinary insect. The achievement was made possible via a number of improvements made to the RoboBee.
Toyota has announced that its CUE humanoid robot has set a new record for the greatest number of consecutive basketball free throws performed by a humanoid AI-powered machine. The robot successfully made 2,020 free throws in a row without missing, earning it a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. The CUE robot was born as a voluntary project for Toyota employees to work on in their spare time.
DJI is perhaps best known for its drones but, at its core, it is a robotics company. It has dabbled in every aspect related to robotics, from computer vision to AI to mechanical engineering. While those have been mostly applied to hobbyist and professional unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs (a.k.a. drones), it has yet to tap one budding market in the robotics industry: education. That changes today with the introduction of the RoboMaster S1, the company's first robot designed for entertainment and education.
Over the past several weeks we've been using the Roborock S6, a robot vacuum made to take on the biggest names in the industry. Roborock does not have the name recognition of the Ecovacs, the Neato, or iRobot's Roomba, but it's a robot. It doesn't know how popular it is - all it need to know is where to go to clean. With LDS Navigation and suction power equal to that of a Neato Botvac D7 Connected, this machine is ready to pick up all your dust immediately.
There are two basic types of robots that scientists are working on that include legged robots and wheeled robots. The supporters of legged robots say that bots need two legs to go where humans go. Supporters of robots with wheels point out that their bots are much faster, which can be very important is some scenarios. Some are trying to combine the attributes of legged and wheeled robots to get the best of both worlds. Cassie Cal falls into that last group.
Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a soft robot that could lead to fully untethered robots for space exploration, search and rescue systems, biomimetics, medical surgery, rehabilitation, and other uses. One key to making the soft robot is that it uses pressurized air to replace multiple control systems with one input.
More than 2,000 preschools in China have introduced robots used for daily health inspections, according to a new report. The robots, which feature fun designs that won't frighten children, utilize tech to detect signs of a potential illness. If a robot finds evidence that a child may be sick, it alerts human operators who can then do their own evaluation and decide whether the student should be sent home.
iRobot is rolling out two new home-cleaning robots today, and they're meant to work together to clean all of the floors in your house. The first robot being introduced today is the Roomba s9+ vacuum, which follows in the footsteps of the vacuum cleaners that first put iRobot on the map. It's joined by the Braava jet m6, a robotic mop that can clean your hard floors beyond what the s9+ is capable of.
People instinctively know how to work together when it comes time to lift something that takes two people. People coordinate their motions and work to be sure that each side of whatever is being carried is at the same height. While tasks like that are natural for a human, for robots, it's not natural at all.