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A new fabrication process enables the creation of soft robots at the millimeter scale with features on the micrometer scale as shown here with the example of a small soft robotic peacock spider with moving body parts and colored eyes and abdomens. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University By Benjamin Boettner Roboticists are envisioning a
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his fully 3D-printed version of the grippers includes “fingernails” on the ends of the fingers to help pick up organisms that are sitting on hard surfaces, as well as mesh extensions between the fingers to keep samples secure. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University By Lindsay Brownell The deep ocean – dark, cold, under high
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Waymo recently announced two new partnerships for their fleet of robotaxis. The first was with Walmart. Walmart has installed special parking spots in their lots, and will offer people free rides to Walmart to pick up online orders. Only some of the 400 Waymo “Early Riders” will participate, at first. The other project involves last
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In this episode of Robots in Depth, Per Sjöborg speaks with Hans Kimblad about 3D printing metal or MAM, metal adaptive manufacturing. Hans describes how the different technologies that are used for MAM work. He then talks through the opportunities and challenges and what one needs to consider when designing for the Höganäs powder sintering
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By John Miller An earlier version of this post was published on Off the Convex Path. It is reposted here with the author’s permission. In the last few years, deep learning practitioners have proposed a litany of different sequence models. Although recurrent neural networks were once the tool of choice, now models like the autoregressive
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Is this the personal home robot we’ve been waiting for? No, but Vector will make you smile San Francisco-based robotics company Anki is launching today a new robot called Vector. It drives on little tank treads, has an expressive LCD face, and is constantly moving around, making beeps and bloops. Vector resembles Anki’s previous robot, Cozmo, but is
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In an op-ed piece published today in The New York Times, MIT President L. Rafael Reif urges a more farsighted response to address China’s attempts to dominate cutting-edge technologies, which have included tactics such as industrial espionage and theft of intellectual property. While strong and decisive action against such practices is essential, Reif writes, it
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When the FBI filed a court order in 2016 commanding Apple to unlock the iPhone of one of the shooters in a terrorist attack in San Bernandino, California, the news made headlines across the globe. Yet every day there are tens of thousands of court orders asking tech companies to turn over Americans’ private data.
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NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab has adapted a Mars rover design into something that you can build in your garage NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars rovers have a special place in my heart. I loved seeing pictures of Sojourner nuzzling up to rocks, and I still wonder whether it managed to drive around the Pathfinder lander after
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But what are they going to do? At CEBIT back in June, Boston Dynamics’ CEO Marc Raibert mentioned in a talk that they’re currently building about 100 SpotMinis, and that they’re planning on scaling that up to be able to build something like 1,000 SpotMinis by the end of 2019. This has attracted some attention
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