In the future, a special robot designed to help protect healthcare workers may test you for the flu, COVID-19, and other pathogens that require a nose swab. The contraption was created by engineers at the Korea Institute of Machinery & Materials (KIMM), which explains that the robot can be also be used to swab a patient's throat for conditions like strep.
We've come a long way since the very first Roomba rolled on living room and kitchen floors. While still sticking to that same circular design, robot vacuum cleaners have changed and evolved considerably over the years, gaining features like obstacle avoidance, simultaneous mopping, or voice control. Roborock's latest S6 MaxV cleaning helper has all those and more, making it one of the smartest robots to grace your floor and certainly one of the more expensive ones as well.
Boston Dynamics' Spot robots are grabbing headlines as a number of them get deployed to help address new limitations brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. This may have generated more interest in quadruped robots but Spot easily costs more than $50,000 and developing your own usually takes years and several teams working together. If you don't mind crediting someone else's work, engineers from the US and Germany have come up with a four-legged robot designed to be a platform that others can build on.
Today Qualcomm revealed the "world's first 5G and AI-enabled robotics platform" in the Qualcomm Robotics RB5 platform. Qualcomm is basically the biggest brand in the tech industry when it comes to processing chips for smartphones, especially when it comes to Android devices. The Qualcomm Robotics RB5 platform utilizes a variety of brand collaborations between Qualcomm and some of the biggest "ecosystem players" in robotics.
Boston Dynamics' robot dog, Spot, has been put up for sale to businesses, offering a four-legged - and somewhat creepy - way to integrate a robot into the workforce. The news expands on Boston Dynamics' early-adopter program launched last September, and marked Spot's move from development platform into regular production. Around 150 of the robots were deployed as part of the program.
Harvard researchers have created a microrobot they call HAMR-JR that's able to run, jump, carry heavy payloads, and is highly maneuverable. It's a half-scale version of another robot developed at Harvard that was inspired by a cockroach called HAMR. HAMR-JR is about the size of a penny and can perform most of the feats its larger predecessor was capable of, which makes it one of the most dexterous microrobots built to date.
Coffee is the beverage of choice for millions of people who need a boost of energy for work or increased focused for exams. The beans are found in a variety of products, including one unexpected machine: a robot. Coffee grounds, it turns out, can help a certain kind of multi-legged robot perform its job with fewer issues, but not for the reasons you think.
Scientists at MIT are researching soft robotics, which is robotics that use flexible materials rather than the traditional rigid materials. The capabilities of soft robots have been limited due to the lack of good sensing. A robotic gripper needs to feel what it is touching and the sense the position of its fingers, a capability that has been missing from most soft robots.
Sphero, the company best known for its BB-8 toy robot, has announced the successful spin-off of its Company Six into a startup that will make robots for the government, military use, and more. Company Six will operate as an independent company, according to Sphero, which says that it will also work on artificial intelligence-based software designed for customers 'who work in dangerous situations.'
Boston Dynamics' more portable version of its BigDog robot is getting around, figuratively and literally. At a time when social distancing and working remotely has become more than just a luxury, Spot's mobility and general-purpose design could be the key to keeping the world turning even with no humans in plain sight. That's the future that New Zealand robotics company Rocos is preparing for, with Spot doing the tedious and often dangerous work that farmers and herders might not be able to do for a while.
You'd think that, after all this time at home waiting out the COVID-19 pandemic, I'd have got around to vacuuming more. Instead I've been offloading most of the responsibility to a robot, with iRobot's Roomba i7+ arguably turning out to be the best company you could hope for (apologies to my spouse and cat) when you're trapped indoors but still housework-averse.
Sony and remotely-controlled robot startup Avatarin are teaming up to make telepresence avatars smarter, borrowing tech from Aibo and more. It's the latest move by the freshly-founded Sony AI, the Japanese firm's incubator for next-gen robotics, artificial intelligence, sensor technology, and more, that was set up back in April.