Bots & Brains

Yesterday Apple has unveiled the Vision Pro, a so called ‘spatial computer’ that blends digital content with the physical world. This device introduces a three-dimensional user interface controlled by natural and intuitive inputs such as eye movements, hand gestures, and voice commands.

The qualities that make a knitted sweater comfortable and easy to wear are the same things that might allow robots to better interact with humans. RobotSweater, developed by a research team from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, is a machine-knitted textile “skin” that can sense contact and pressure.

Today Matthijs Smakman will defend his doctoral thesis titled “Robots in Education: The Morally Responsible Deployment of Robot Assistants”. Conducted under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Elly Konijn, his empirically grounded research represents a significant milestone in achieving a morally responsible integration of social robots as educational assistants in primary schools. Previous studies have already indicated that the utilization of social robots yields better outcomes compared to traditional educational technologies.

Miniaturization is progressing rapidly in just any field and the trend towards the creation of ever smaller units is also prevalent in the world of robot technology. In the future, minuscule robots used in medical and pharmaceutical applications might be able to transport medication to targeted sites in the body. A team of researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has taken a new approach to the issue by analyzing a group of robots and how they behave as collectives of motile units based on the model of active Brownian particles.

Scientists found that students given a task by a social robot with a voice programmed to be engaging and inspiring performed better and were more creative than students who received the task from an identical robot with a flat voice.

A machine learning model can predict the locations of minerals on Earth—and potentially other planets—by taking advantage of patterns in mineral associations. Science and industry seek mineral deposits to both better understand the history of our planet and to extract for use in technologies like rechargeable batteries.

A Cornell University-led experiment in which two people play a modified version of Tetris revealed that players who get fewer turns perceived the other player as less likable, regardless of whether a person or an algorithm allocated the turns.

Engineers at the University of Waterloo have discovered a new way to program robots to help people with dementia locate medicine, glasses, phones and other objects they need but have lost. 

As AI becomes increasingly realistic, our trust in those with whom we communicate may be compromised. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg have examined how advanced AI systems impact our trust in the individuals we interact with.

Researchers at Oregon State University are part of a $5 million National Science Foundation effort to accelerate robotics research by making standardized humanoid robots available to the scientific community.