Robotics

A pair of researchers with Leibniz University of Hannover has demonstrated the means by which robots might be programmed to experience something akin to pain in animals. As part of their demonstration at last week's IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation held in Stockholm, Johannes Kuehn and Sami Haddaddin showed how pain might be used in robots, by interacting with a BioTac fingertip sensor on the end of a Kuka robotic arm that...

The Innorobo event, taking place this week in Paris, aims to initiate dialogue on the role of robots in our society and to show the impact of new technologies in our professional and personal lives every day.

The drones and robots market is expected to grow at CAGR of 9.4% between 2015 and 2021, reaching a total revenue of $46bn by 2021. In its latest report, Yole Développement (Yole) highlighted that: “More and better sensors means more and better robots.”

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart are presenting a motion system - a so-called elastic actuator - that is compliant and can be integrated in robots thanks to its space-saving design. The actuator works with hyperelastic membranes that surround air-filled chambers. The volume of the chambers can be controlled by means of an electric field at the membrane.

Curator Ben Russell's dream is to rebuild the UK’s first robot, Eric. Built in 1928, Eric holds a unique place in our history. He was everything we now imagine a robot to be – a talking, moving mechanical person. But then Eric disappeared and no-one knows what happened to him.

Before a robot arm can reach into a tight space or pick up a delicate object, the robot needs to know precisely where its hand is. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute have shown that a camera attached to the robot’s hand can rapidly create a 3D model of its environment and also locate the hand within that 3D world.

In experiments involving a simulation of the human esophagus and stomach, researchers at MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have demonstrated a tiny origami robot that can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule and, steered by external magnetic fields, crawl across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound.

Robots today can perform space missions, solve a Rubik’s cube, sort hospital medication and even make pancakes. But most can’t manage the simple act of grasping a pencil and spinning it around to get a solid grip. Intricate tasks that require dexterous in-hand manipulation — rolling, pivoting, bending, sensing friction and other things humans do effortlessly with our hands — have proved notoriously difficult for robots.

The dirty, dusty and noisy environment of a busy building site is perhaps the last place you’d expect to find the latest technology innovations. Indeed, the majority of fundamental building tools haven’t really changed that much since mankind developed the ability to create them. However, the high-tech buildings and cities of tomorrow are being designed and constructed by equally revolutionary technology.

Mobile Industrial Robots, MiR, has announced that it has opened a US office and its award-winning autonomous mobile robot—the MiR100—will be available to North American companies as another tool to drive efficiency. Already in use in 19 countries at prominent manufacturers such as Leoni, Flextronics, and Continental, MiR leads a new generation of autonomous mobile robots whose ease of use, flexibility and payback of less than a year w...