Robotics

Children learn words using the same method as robots, according to psychologists. This suggests that early learning is based not on conscious thought but on an automatic ability to associate objects which enables babies to quickly make sense of their environment. Dr Katie Twomey from Lancaster University, with Dr Jessica Horst from Sussex University, Dr Anthony Morse and Professor Angelo Cangelosi from Plymouth wanted to find out how yo...

Amada Miyachi Europe now offer a range of robot dispensing system options that can be fully customised for use in the automotive, electronics and solar cells, information technology and multimedia, medical, aerospace, and defence industries. Amada Miyachi Europe combines its standard desktop XYZ fluid dispensing systems with precision, user-friendly JANOME Industrial Equipment desktop robots that can dramatically boost productivity.

With safety concerns arising from the growing number of commercial drones sold in the UK, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has updated its UK Dronecode in an effort to improve safety. The fact is that the skies above the UK, much like our roads, are becoming more congested and incidents of drones narrowly avoiding collisions with passenger planes are becoming commonplace.

The use of UAVs or drones is growing both in the commercial and academic realms. Companies and governmental agencies are finding them increasingly useful to help their businesses, while researchers constantly are exploring unique uses for the devices. But that growth involves a technology that is still new and always evolving. From fixed-wing drones to quad-copter models, large and small, the usefulness and mechanics of UAV technology are st...

What could possibly be better than the Christmas fireworks display at Disney World Florida, you might be asking yourself? Disney and Intel have partnered together to create a new type of light show where 300 colourful lights will fly simultaneously to the sound of holiday harmonies. The drone performance is called ‘Starbright Holidays’.

The online testing and assessment system tool, MapleSim, from Maplesoft is being employed at The University of Manchester where Dr. Joaquin Carrasco, Professor of Control Systems at the University’s School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, has taught various control systems courses to Master’s students for the past six years.

The quest to develop a wireless micro-robot for biomedical applications requires a small-scale "motor" that can be wirelessly powered through biological media. While magnetic fields can be used to power small robots wirelessly, they do not provide selectivity since all actuators (the components controlling motion) under the same magnetic field just follow the same motion.

At Google's DeepMind, a team has made AI inroads in speed and performance. The researchers behind the effort have put out a paper describing the maneuvers and the paper is on arXiv, titled "Reinforcement learning with unsupervised auxiliary tasks." Authors are Max Jaderberg, Volodymyr Mnih, Wojciech Marian Czarnecki, Tom Schaul, Joel Leibo, David Silver and Koray Kavukcuoglu, of DeepMind, London.

Tom White, senior lecturer in Victoria's School of Design, has created Smilevector—a bot that examines images of people, then adds or removes smiles to their faces. "It has examined hundreds of thousands of faces to learn the difference between images, by finding relations and reapplying them," says Mr White. "When the computer finds an image it looks to identify if the person is smiling or not. If there isn't a smile, it adds one...

On the wall of Aaron Dollar's office is a poster for R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), the 1920 Czech play that gave us the word "robot." The story ends with the nominal robots seizing control of the factory of their origin and then wiping out nearly all of humanity. Dollar, fortunately, has something more cheerful in mind for the future of human-robot relations. He sees them as helpers in our daily lives—performing tasks like settin...