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Washington university develops 3D-printed robotic gripper that can pick up anything, no matter what its geometry

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At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, car manufacturing companies such as Ford quickly shifted their production focus from automobiles to masks and ventilators.

To make this switch possible, these companies relied on people working on an assembly line. It would have been too challenging for a robot to make this transition because robots are tied to their usual tasks.

Theoretically, a robot could pick up almost anything if its grippers could be swapped out for each task. To keep costs down, these grippers could be passive, meaning grippers pick up objects without changing shape, similar to how the tongs on a forklift work. [Read more…] about Washington university develops 3D-printed robotic gripper that can pick up anything, no matter what its geometry

Human-like hands for robots move one step closer with Italian scientist’s invention

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An Italian scientist has invented a robotic end effector that could bring the goal of robots having human-like hands one step closer.

Corrado De Pascali and his colleagues on the Italian Institute of Technology have unveiled an end effector which uses tiny, 8-gram actuators to power many different joints in the complex component.

According to report in New Scientist and several other outlets, the actuators – although small – can actually lift “1,000 times their own weight”. [Read more…] about Human-like hands for robots move one step closer with Italian scientist’s invention

Soft assistive robotic wearables get a boost from rapid design tool

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Scientists created a new design and fabrication tool for soft pneumatic actuators with integrated sensing, which can power personalized healthcare, smart homes, and gaming.

Soft, pneumatic actuators might not be a phrase that comes up in daily conversations, but more likely than not you might have benefited from their utility. The devices use compressed air to power motion, and with sensing capabilities, they’ve proven to be a critical backbone in a variety of applications such as assistive wearables, robotics, and rehabilitative technologies.

But there’s a bit of a bottleneck in creating the little dynamic devices that have advantages like high response rates and power to input ratios. They require a manual design and fabrication pipeline, which translates to a lot of trial and error cycles to actually test and see whether the designs will work. [Read more…] about Soft assistive robotic wearables get a boost from rapid design tool

Carnegie Mellon develops robots that ‘learn household tasks by watching humans’

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By Aaron Aupperlee

Novel method developed by Carnegie Mellon University researchers enables robots to ‘learn in the wild’

The robot watched as Shikhar Bahl opened the refrigerator door. It recorded his movements, the swing of the door, the location of the fridge and more, analyzing this data and readying itself to mimic what Bahl had done.

It failed at first, missing the handle completely at times, grabbing it in the wrong spot or pulling it incorrectly. But after a few hours of practice, the robot succeeded and opened the door.

“Imitation is a great way to learn,” says Bahl, a PhD student at the Robotics Institute (RI) in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. “Having robots actually learn from directly watching humans remains an unsolved problem in the field, but this work takes a significant step in enabling that ability.” [Read more…] about Carnegie Mellon develops robots that ‘learn household tasks by watching humans’

Columbia University engineers build robot that ‘learns to imagine itself’

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Columbia Engineers build a robot that learns to understand itself, rather than the world around it

As every athletic or fashion-conscious person knows, our body image is not always accurate or realistic, but it’s an important piece of information that determines how we function in the world. 

When you get dressed or play ball, your brain is constantly planning ahead so that you can move your body without bumping, tripping, or falling over.

We humans acquire our body-model as infants, and robots are following suit. A Columbia Engineering team has created a robot that – for the first time – is able to learn a model of its entire body from scratch, without any human assistance. (See video below.) [Read more…] about Columbia University engineers build robot that ‘learns to imagine itself’

Keep Yourself Safe While Cycling With These Useful Tips

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A couple of decades ago, you could argue that bicycle accidents weren’t a thing. But fast-forwarding to 2022, an increasing number of people are biking to work. And while there are many reasons for this uptick in bicycle fatalities, one of the most common is dooring. [Read more…] about Keep Yourself Safe While Cycling With These Useful Tips

How the MIT mini cheetah learns to run

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By Rachel Gordon, MIT CSAIL

CSAIL scientists came up with a learning pipeline for the four-legged robot that learns to run entirely by trial and error in simulation (see video below)

It’s been roughly 23 years since one of the first robotic animals trotted on the scene, defying classical notions of our cuddly four-legged friends.

Since then, a barrage of the walking, dancing, and door-opening machines have commanded their presence, a sleek mixture of batteries, sensors, metal, and motors. [Read more…] about How the MIT mini cheetah learns to run

Wikswo and VIIBRE team to build third-generation ‘self-driving lab’ with $1 million from National Science Foundation

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John Wikswo, founder and director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education and Gordon A. Cain University Professor, is the principal investigator of a $1 million award from the National Science Foundation.

The object is to build a pathbreaking “robot scientist” – a fully automated microfluidic system for parallel, independent, long-duration, machine-guided experiments.

The target organisms are the single-cell eukaryotic yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, commonly known as brewer’s and baker’s yeast, the bacterium Escherichia coli and other microbes used in commercial biotechnologies, and the Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells used to produce antibody-based drugs and vaccines. [Read more…] about Wikswo and VIIBRE team to build third-generation ‘self-driving lab’ with $1 million from National Science Foundation

New sensor that mimics automatic human reaction to heat could pave the way for ‘soft robots of the future’

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A new robotic sensor that mimics the automatic human reaction to heat is being hailed as a world first.

The device has been built by a team of experts from Liverpool Hope University, who say it’s the first sensor that can trigger this “sensory impulse” that the robotics community has yet seen.

The findings have been published in IEEE Xplore last December 15, 2021 as an early-access article and published this month in the IEEE Sensors Journal. [Read more…] about New sensor that mimics automatic human reaction to heat could pave the way for ‘soft robots of the future’

UAE scientists figure out way to get swarm robots to split up tasks efficiently

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Researchers at the Technology Innovation Institute in the UAE are developing a new paradigm for teaching robot swarms how to allocate themselves to tasks efficiently. 

The ideas – published in the paper, Group-Size Regulation in Self-organized Aggregation in Robot Swarms – could spark interest in better ways of controlling lots of simple robots to do more complicated tasks independently, with little or no outside communication.

Much prior work has been done to organizing swarms of drones to perform impressive tasks, such as a coordinated light show. But these approaches often relied on centralized coordination, expensive equipment in each drone, or both. [Read more…] about UAE scientists figure out way to get swarm robots to split up tasks efficiently