Physicists have discovered a new way to coat soft robots in materials that allow them to move and function in a more purposeful way. The research, led by the UK's University of Bath, is described today in Science Advances.
Authors of the study believe their breakthrough modelling on 'active matter' could mark a turning point in the design of robots. With further development of the concept, it may be possible to determine the shape, movement and behaviour of a soft solid not by its natural elasticity but by human-controlled activity on its surface.
Robots are featuring more and more in our daily lives. They can be incredibly useful (bionic limbs, robotic lawnmowers, or robots which deliver meals to people in quarantine), or merely entertaining (robotic dogs, dancing toys, and acrobatic drones). Imagination is perhaps the only limit to what robots will be able to do in the future.
The automation of U.S. manufacturing — robots replacing people on factory floors — is fueling rising mortality rate among America’s working-age adults, according to a new study by researchers at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.
It’s no secret that one of the most significant constraints on robots is power. Most robots need lots of it, and it has to come from somewhere, with that somewhere usually being a battery because there simply aren’t many other good options. Batteries, however, are famous for having poor energy density, and the smaller your robot is, the more of a problem this becomes.
Scientists have created a robot consisting of multiple units that can operate as a cluster, responding to stimuli and acting on their environment without the need for any centralized control—much like living cells.
The promising thing about laundry-folding robots is that they target a job that everybody does frequently, and nobody really likes. But to be successful in robotics, especially in consumer robotics, you have to be both affordable and reliable, and robots are, still, generally awful at those things.
It was the 1970s, the Cold War was in full swing, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Research and Development had developed a miniaturized listening device. But they didn’t have a good way to maneuver the device into place without raising suspicions.
As rumored, AIBO is back. After more than a decade away, Sony has decided to resurrect its iconic robot pet brand with a brand new model simply called “Aibo” (model number ERS-1000).
When the Sony Aibo was discontinued in 2006, it was arguably the most sophisticated consumer robot that you could get your hands on. Aibo was smart, cute, fun. It was also hackable. Many people who owned Aibos loved their robots (perhaps a bit too much), and even more people wished they’d had one.
Renewable, carbon neutral energy is critical to a future where we’re not all living on rafts in the middle of a suddenly much larger ocean. Happily, we’ve got lots of ways of generating renewable energy, like solar farms, wind farms, and hydropower. Despite this diversity, renewables are horrendously inefficient compared with the dense solid or liquid combustibles that come straight out of the ground, both in terms of the energy density that they represent, as well as the amount of physical space that it takes to harvest them.
