Bots & Brains

Across a vast array of robotic hands and clamps, there is a common foe: the heirloom tomato. You may have seen a robotic gripper deftly pluck an egg or smoothly palm a basketball – but, unlike human hands, one gripper is unlikely to be able to do both and a key challenge remains hidden in the middle ground.

Tetraplegic patients are prisoners of their own bodies, unable to speak or perform the slightest movement. Researchers have been working for years to develop systems that can help these patients carry out some tasks on their own.

When it comes to robots, bigger isn’t always better. Someday, a swarm of insect-sized robots might pollinate a field of crops or search for survivors amid the rubble of a collapsed building.

A maze is a popular device among psychologists to assess the learning capacity of mice or rats. But how about robots? Can they learn to successfully navigate the twists and turns of a labyrinth? Now, researchers at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany, have proven they can.

Merlin Labs has reached an agreement with Ameriflight to equip the cargo airline’s fleet with autonomous and semi-autonomous flight capability. Ameriflight cites potential for enhanced safety, cost savings, and a solution to the pilot shortage.

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) need traffic data to run smoothly. At intersections, where there is the greatest potential for conflicts between road users, being able to reliably and intelligently monitor the different modes of traffic is crucial.

Researchers in Harbin Institute of Technology’s School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation have developed a robotic arm weighing 9.23 kilograms — about the size of a one-year-old baby — capable of carrying almost a quarter of its own weight, with the ability to adjust its position and speed in real time based on its environment. They published their results on Sept. 28 in Space: Science & Technology.

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.