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An extra pair of wings makes robot insects much easier to control In 2013, some folks from Rob Wood’s lab at Harvard, including then-postdoc Sawyer Buckminster Fuller, published a paper in Science introducing a (mostly) controllable version RoboBee, an insect-size flying robot that could lift itself, hover, and move around a bit using two flapping
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Desert ants can navigate remarkably well with the aid of the sun, a skill that robots are trying to duplicate Insects in general are unfailingly impressive with how intelligent and capable they are, with an absolute minimum of sensing and computing power. Where things start to get really interesting is when insects have to get
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By Rohin Shah and Dmitrii Krasheninnikov It would be great if we could all have household robots do our chores for us. Chores are tasks that we want done to make our houses cater more to our preferences; they are a way in which we want our house to be different from the way it
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This week Washington DC was abuzz with news that had nothing to do with the occupant of The While House. A group of progressive legislators, led by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, in the House of Representatives, introduced “The Green New Deal.” The resolution by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was in response to the alarming Fourth National
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The new “American AI Initiative” is heavy on bombast, light on specifics Yesterday, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the American AI Initiative, with the aim of “accelerating our national leadership” in artificial intelligence. The announcement framed it as an effort to win an AI arms race of sorts:  “Americans have profited tremendously from
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Legendary inventor James West is trying to save lives with a smart stethoscope This blog post is about a coauthor of the IEEE Spectrum feature article: “A Smart Stethoscope Puts AI in Medics’ Ears.” The invention that made James E. West famous came out of his conviction that he could make things better. West was
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Joints that are reconfigurable on the fly help this small robot avoid obstacles Different animals are optimized for different things, and this optimization is reflected in the structures of their bodies. It’s especially evident in the skeletons of animals designed to move around on land, where there’s a crazy diversity of limbs and joints and
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The legendary inventor’s latest project is saving lives with a smart stethoscope The invention that made James E. West famous came out of his conviction that he could make things better. West was born into a world in dire need of improvement. He grew up during the Great Depression in rural Virginia, where racial segregation
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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!): HRI 2019 – March 11-14, 2019 – Daegu, Korea
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In Japan, you’ll be able to rent a home robot that someone else occasionally inhabits to fold your clothes Laundry is way, way, way up there on the list of things that people really wish robots could do for them. It’s a very hard problem, though—we’ve (sort of) seen some amount of laundry cycle success
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