Robotics

Now open for entries, is a new Infrastructure Robot Challenge, which is part of the second annual UK Robotics Week 2017, a national week of celebration being held 24th–30th June 2017.  Robotics researchers from around the world are invited to sign up now for the international ‘Robots for Resilient Infrastructure’ Challenge event, which will be held at University of Leeds from 27th–28th June 2017. Registrations of inte...

  A group of Japanese researchers developed a prototype construction robot for disaster relief situations. This prototype has drastically improved operability and mobility compared to conventional construction machines.

A Cornell group has devised a way for a soft robot to feel its surroundings internally, in much the same way humans do. A group led by Robert Shepherd, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and principal investigator of Organic Robotics Lab, has published a paper describing how stretchable optical waveguides act as curvature, elongation and force sensors in a soft robotic hand.

A robot cell developed using two Mitsubishi Electric MELFA RV Series robots has used the latest robot control technology to ensure their movements are suitably synchronised. The production cell in question prints and assembles over three million components per year, changing over seamlessly on-demand to assemble a range of different parts.

Roboticists at UC Berkeley have designed a small robot that can leap into the air and then spring off a wall, or perform multiple vertical jumps in a row, resulting in the highest robotic vertical jumping agility ever recorded. The agility of the robot opens new pathways of locomotion that were not previously attainable. The researchers hope that one day this robot and other vertically agile robots can be used to jump around rubble in search and ...

A partnership between the Polytechnic School and the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of São Paulo (USP) achieved a new patent. Researchers developed a prototype of a type of eye prosthesis with eyelids that blink in sync with the healthy eye. The project had two FD professors, Neide Coto and Reinaldo Dias, and a student of engineering at the Polytechnic, Paulo Oguro. The system was patented by the USP Innovation Agency in 2015.

This fall’s Federal Aviation Administration regulations have made drone flight easier than ever for both companies and consumers. But what if the drones out on the market aren’t exactly what you want? A new system from MIT’s CSAIL is the first to allow users to design, simulate, and build their own custom drone. Users can change the size, shape, and structure of their drone based on the specific needs they have for payload,...

People confined to a wheelchair are still confronted with insurmountable obstacles in everyday life – even in today’s more wheelchair-accessible society. There are often no elevators in a building – or if so, they’re out of order. And while there are already wheelchairs that can climb stairs, persons with physical disabilities still require assistance to prevent tipping over. Researchers at the Technical University of Muni...

Delta Electronics has announced a portable handheld interface enabling the operator to move around the machine or the robot, to be able to monitor and control closely the process and interact with it in real time. The DOP-H HMI is suitable for use with industrial robots, robot arms, assembly machines and other motion control systems. 

At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, technologist Douglas Hofmann and his collaborators are building a better gear. Hofmann is the lead author of two recent papers on gears made from bulk metallic glass (BMG), a specially crafted alloy with properties that make it ideal for robotics. "Although BMGs have been explored for a long time, understanding how to design and implement them into structural hardware has proven el...