The trend toward smaller mechanism footprints and volumes, while maintaining the ability to perform complex tasks, presents the opportunity for exploration of hypercompact mechanical systems integrated with curved surfaces. Developable surfaces are sh…
Tag: robotics
Future farms without farmers
A robotic revolution will allow the world to produce much more food more sustainably.
AntBot: A six-legged walking robot able to home like desert ants in outdoor environments
Autonomous outdoor navigation requires reliable multisensory fusion strategies. Desert ants travel widely every day, showing unrivaled navigation performance using only a few thousand neurons. In the desert, pheromones are instantly destroyed by the e…
Toward adaptive robotic sampling of phytoplankton in the coastal ocean
Currents, wind, bathymetry, and freshwater runoff are some of the factors that make coastal waters heterogeneous, patchy, and scientifically interesting—where it is challenging to resolve the spatiotemporal variation within the water column. We …
On the choice of grasp type and location when handing over an object
The human hand is capable of performing countless grasps and gestures that are the basis for social activities. However, which grasps contribute the most to the manipulation skills needed during collaborative tasks, and thus which grasps should be inc…
Robots can build entire cities almost for free. These architects are making it happen.
Manuel Jimenez Garcia and Gilles Retsin are literally setting the foundations for an architecture of the future. They are co-founders of the Design Computation Lab at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, where they work with…
Translucent soft robots driven by frameless fluid electrode dielectric elastomer actuators
Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) are a promising enabling technology for a wide range of emerging applications, including robotics, artificial muscles, and microfluidics. This is due to their large actuation strains, rapid response rate, low cost…
Exoskeletal cyborg-type robot
The scope of research on exoskeletal cyborg-type robots has progressed far beyond mechanisms for maneuvering piloted mecha as imagined by science fiction, and cybernics—the fusion of humans, robots, and information systems—is shaping the w…
Controlling sensation intensity for electrotactile stimulation in human-machine interfaces
A barrier to practical use of electrotactile stimulation for haptic feedback has been large variability in perceived sensation intensity because of changes in the impedance of the electrode-skin interface, such as when electrodes peel or users sweat. …
Soft erythrocyte-based bacterial microswimmers for cargo delivery
Bacteria-propelled biohybrid microswimmers have recently shown to be able to actively transport and deliver cargos encapsulated into their synthetic constructs to specific regions locally. However, usage of synthetic materials as cargo carriers can re…