Bots & Brains

Impressions of a robot’s personality can be influenced by the way it looks, sounds, and feels. But now, researchers from Japan have found specific causal relationships between impressions of robot personality and body texture.

A new strategy to reduce the spread of COVID-19 employs a mobile robot that detects people in crowds who are not observing social-distancing rules, navigates to them, and encourages them to move apart. Adarsh Jagan Sathyamoorthy of the University of Maryland, College Park, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on December 1, 2021.

A grant by the National Science Foundation to researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Syracuse University aims to open new avenues of robotic study of coral reefs by developing autonomous underwater vehicles capable of navigating complex environments and of collecting data over long periods of time.

Students in UC’s Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Systems Laboratory have solved a complex problem in three-dimensional digital simulations: opening of doors by a robot. Now they’re building an autonomous robot that not only can open its own doors but also can find the nearest electric wall outlet to recharge without human assistance.

From self-driving cars to unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous robots are emerging in a more prominent role in everyday life, and researcher Ryan Williams has his eye on the role that multi-robot systems will play. He believes a better understanding of autonomous coordination in those systems will be critical to solving real-world problems in the digital age.

A team of scientists from Beijing Institute of Technology, China proposed an automatic robot-rat interaction framework that enables a robotic rat to realize real-time localization, tracking and movement analysis of a laboratory rat.

The shortage of natural pollinators, such as bees, is threatening global food production around the…

Published in the Journal of Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, a study by engineers from UNSW proposes a freeway network design with exclusive lanes for autonomous vehicles.

Can intelligence be taught to robots? Advances in physical reservoir computing, a technology that makes sense of brain signals, could contribute to creating artificial intelligence machines that think like us.

The Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC), the first autonomous racecar competition at the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway, is preparing for thousands of fans to attend. On October 23, 2021, 21 universities from 9 countries forming 9 teams will compete in this first-of-its kind competition. The teams will be competing for $1 million in prize money, which will be used to advance the education and research missions of the winning universities.