Bots & Brains

Researchers at the University of Zurich and the Delft University of Technology have found that information from onboard cameras can be used to stabilize a drone and keep it flying autonomously after one rotor suddenly gives out.

John Deere has been honored in the Robotics category of the 2021 CES Innovation Awards, which recognize outstanding product design and engineering in consumer technology products. This is the second straight year John Deere has received a CES Innovation Award.

Energy Systems Network (ESN) and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS), organizers of the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC), unveiled at CES 2021 the official racecar that will be autonomously driven by scores of university teams in the world’s first high-speed, head-to-head autonomous race at the Racing Capital of the World on Oct. 23, 2021.

Combining electronic structure calculations and machine learning (ML) techniques has become a common approach in the atomistic modelling of matter. Using the two techniques together has allowed researchers, for instance, to create models that use atomic coordinates as the only inputs to inexpensively predict any property that can be computed by the first-principles calculations that had been used to train them.

After three years of development, DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge teams will get the chance to compete in the Final Event being held at the Louisville Mega Cavern in Louisville, Kentucky on September 21-23, 2021.

Diabetes continues to be the leading cause of new cases of blindness among adults in the United States. But the current shortage of eye-care providers would make it impossible to keep up with demand to provide the requisite annual screenings for this population.

Operators of the primary particle accelerator at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility are getting a new tool to help them quickly address issues that can prevent it from running smoothly. A new machine learning system has passed its first two-week test, correctly identifying glitchy accelerator components and the type of glitches they’re experiencing in near-real-time.

Scientists have developed a machine-learning method that crunches massive amounts of data to help determine which existing medications could improve outcomes in diseases for which they are not prescribed.

As reported in the January 1, 2021 issue of the journal Science, a team of physicists and engineers have proposed a new principle by which active matter systems can spontaneously order, without need for higher level instructions or even programmed interaction among the agents. And they have demonstrated this principle in a variety of systems, including groups of periodically shape-changing robots called “smarticles” – smart, active particles.

In new paper, experts working at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and physics-based simulation share how computer simulation could accelerate the development of “smart robots” which “might interact with humans”