NASA recently funded a new potential future way to explore the Red Planet: Marsbee, an insect-like flying robot that could operate in swarms with a rover serving as a base station. Marsbees are described as about the size of a bumblebee with wings like you'd find on a cicada; they don't need much energy and can be recharged from a rover that doubles as a communication center.
When you play PUBG Mobile, you're not playing JUST other PUBG Mobile gamers. Instead, as we've found, some players aren't playing on their mobile devices. Other players aren't players at all - they're bots. It would appear that the game is only partially populated by real mobile users. The rest are big fat liars, cheats, and artificial intelligence.
The challenge for designers of robots that walk on two legs like humans is that these bipedal robots tend to fall over. Humans are very good at balancing, but robots not so much. A new robot has been designed at the Guangdong University of Technology that is much more stable than other bipedal robots out there thanks to one unique feature.
A new XPRIZE competition promises part of a $10m bounty for developing a real-life avatar, a robotic stand-in for humans that could virtually take us to distant or perilous locations. Announced at SXSW 2018 today, the new XPRIZE is open to participants globally, though the challenge isn't going to be easy to beat.
Robots in the workforce is a controversial topic. While machines come with many benefits -- they never get sick and only need breaks for maintenance, for example -- they come with a big downside: the potential to take over "unskilled" jobs, leaving many without work. One of those jobs is burger flipping, the stereotypical example of a position at risk. Here to fill the role is Flippy, a burger-flipping robot that has started work.
Back in 2015, the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) created a robot called Walk-Man to participate in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. The researchers at the IIT have been working on improving that robot ever since. The latest version of Walk-Man is at its final validation phase and has received a big update to help it prepare to fight disasters in the future.
Earlier this month, Boston Dynamics demonstrated a version of its SpotMini robot that contains an arm and claw/clamp on the end of the armature. The robot was demonstrated opening a door and walking through, but that was too simple of a task, apparently. This time around, the robotics company has demonstrated the robot actively resisting an aggressive human who is getting in the way.
NASA's Curiosity rover has called Mars home for years and it's work isn't done yet. The rover will soon start yet another investigative mission, this time climbing the Red Planet's Mount Sharp, a mountain located in the Gale Crater. Ahead of starting its climb, though, Curiosity paused in the crater's rim to snap a selfie with the mountain featured in the background.
Today we got our first chance to take a look at the newest version of Sony Aibo. This is the electronic puppy dog that Sony re-introduced to the world late last year after an extended time of darkness. That is, a time without the doggy. People loved this dog's predecessor. They loved this robot dog's family members so much, they had funerals for them when they "died." Now, here in Las Vegas in January of 2018, we get to see the greatest robot puppy again.
A hospital in Nagoya, Japan, has deployed robots to help nurses during the overnight shift. The robots aren't involved with patients, instead designed to serve as something like a rolling delivery cabinet. Less nurses work the overnight shift, leaving less humans to take items where they're needed. These robots fill that void, transporting medicine, samples and other items between in-hospital destinations.
San Francisco has banned sidewalk delivery robots, squashing a delivery method that is still in its infancy. Not many of these robots exist, but some companies, such as Domino's, are testing them in various regions. The decision to ban these bots from operating on public sidewalks was made unanimously by the city's Board of Supervisors.
Scientists from MIT and Harvard have been working in the field of soft robotics in an attempt to fix new of the major shortcomings of the genre, the lack of strength. These soft robots are typically too weak to allow much in the way of functionality, but that may be changing with a new breakthrough from scientists from MIT CSAIL and the Harvard Wyss Institute.