Robotics

The battery is the beating heart of a drone. The performance of the battery is the key factor in determining the drone’s range and how much payload it can carry – particularly relevant when you consider the delivery applications envisaged for drones by the likes of Amazon and Google.

UK robotics innovation is taking centre stage this summer, with the announcement of a nationwide programme of exciting events for the first ever UK Robotics Week from 25th June to 1st July 2016. Events for people of all ages are being held up and down the country, spanning public lectures, open labs, schools, academic competitions, hackathons, tech weekends for children and cutting-edge robotics showcases.

When David Lentink watches a pigeon dart around a building and land perfectly in its roost, however, he sees the future of robotic flight. Lentink, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford, has been studying birds in flight for years, with an eye toward applying the tricks birds use to navigate changing conditions in the real world to design better aerial robots.

Planning algorithms for teams of robots fall into two categories: centralised algorithms, in which a single computer makes decisions for the whole team, and decentralised algorithms, in which each robot makes its own decisions based on local observations. With centralised algorithms, if the central computer goes offline, the whole system falls apart. Decentralised algorithms handle erratic communication better, but they're harder to design, becau...

"Three, two, one ... GO!" the announcer hollers, and as the racers fix their thoughts on pushing the cubes, the drones suddenly whir, rise and buzz through the air. Some struggle to move even a few feet, while others zip confidently across the finish line. The competition—billed as the world's first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface—involved 16 pilots who used their willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard dash...

Software from Belgian-based company Zora Bots is helping to bring humanoid robots out of the realms of science fiction and into reality. The software has been designed for the Aldebaran Nao and Pepper humanoid robots that have made significant ground in the development of new generation robotics over the last two years.

There have been several high profile incidents of UAVs, or drones, entering into areas where they shouldn’t be – leading to concerns that they could be employed by criminal or terrorist groups. Whether that threat is real or whether there is an element of scaremongering going on, there is no doubting the rapid rise in the number of commercial drones taking to the skies.

Soon, industrial robots will be used at lower cost in small-scale production thanks to the operating system developed by the Dutch-German partnership SInBot. Doctoral research by Maarten Essers from the University of Twente shows that the results from preliminary tests are promising. Major companies in the manufacturing industry, such as car manufacturers, are using smart robots for mass production more and more often.

A new partnership has been announced between TM Robotics and Cornerstone Automation Systems that will see the two companies collaborate to produce an intelligent box opening device (IBOD) that combines the features of TM Robotics’ Toshiba Machine robots and CASI’s intelligent box opening software.

Researchers at ETH Zurich, Disney Research Zurich, and Carnegie Mellon University have developed a software tool that empowers average users to design custom robotic creatures and their movements. The user starts by creating a basic skeleton for the desired robot, specifying how many extremities the figure will have and how many segments there will be in the backbone. This skeleton can be modified at will by extending or shortening its segme...