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Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!): Robotic Arena – January 12, 2019 – Wrocław, Poland
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Mechanical metamaterials can have their rigidity tuned, offering a new approach to soft robotics Metamaterials seem like a technology out of science fiction. Because of the way these materials affect electromagnetic phenomena and physical attributes of materials, they can render objects invisible, leaving the observer in disbelief. While invisibility cloaks are a gee-whiz application, metamaterials
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AlphaZero, a general-purpose game-playing system, quickly taught itself to be the best player ever in Go, chess and Shogi DeepMind, the London-based subsidiary of Alphabet, has created a system that can quickly master any game in the class that includes chess, Go, and Shogi, and do so without human guidance. The system, called AlphaZero, began its life last year by beating a
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How UAVs benefit consumers through faster estimates, quicker response times and faster delivery of benefits Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), more commonly known as drones, are growing at a rapid rate for both consumer and professional markets. Market research firm IHS Markit forecasts the professional drone market will manage a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of
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Humans walk with straight legs and most robots don’t, but IHMC is teaching Atlas to do better Humanoid robots have a very distinctive walk. Knees bent, torso as stationary as possible. Even Boston Dynamics’ own Atlas uses this crouching sort of squat-walk to get around, because those perpetually bent legs are how it keeps from falling
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“The Laughing Room,” an interactive art installation by author, illustrator, and MIT graduate student Jonathan “Jonny” Sun, looks like a typical living room: couches, armchairs, coffee table, soft lighting. This cozy scene, however, sits in a glass-enclosed space, flanked by bright lights and a microphone, with a bank of laptops and a video camera positioned across
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A robot that can detect a plant’s electrochemical signals goes where the plant wants it to go Cybernetics usually refers to humans enhancing themselves with robotic parts. Sometimes, we heard about animal-robot cyborgs, or insect-robot cyborgs. It’s not all that often that we hear about plant-robot cyborgs, because what’s a plant going to do with
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The pioneering social robot company has sold its IP and assets, meaning that this is pretty much the end In some very sad but not at all surprising news considering how things have been going for social robots lately, The Robot Report is, er, reporting that Jibo Inc. has completed the sale of its assets
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By Chelsea Finn∗, Frederik Ebert∗, Sudeep Dasari, Annie Xie, Alex Lee, and Sergey Levine With very little explicit supervision and feedback, humans are able to learn a wide range of motor skills by simply interacting with and observing the world through their senses. While there has been significant progress towards building machines that can learn
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The RePaint system reproduces paintings by combining two approaches called color-contoning and half-toning, as well as a deep learning model focused on determining how to stack 10 different inks to recreate the specific shades of color.Image courtesy of the researchers By Rachel Gordon The empty frames hanging inside the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum serve as
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