Robotics

China’s Manufacturers Are Shifting Towards Zero-Labor Factories

A company in South China’s Guangdong province is building the city’s first zero-labor factory. It’s an effort to address worker shortages and rising labor costs, but the rise of semi-autonomous “smart factories” could be a sign of things to come, in China and elsewhere. Photo: Robots with intelligent sensors examining products (Gov.cn) As China Daily…

Watch The ATRIAS Bipedal Robot Take A Stroll In The Park

Ah, spring has sprung. The weather’s warm, the trees are starting to bud, and robots are frolicking about — including ATRIAS, a two-legged bot developed by researchers at Oregon State University. When we last saw ATRIAS,it was getting pelted in a rather one-sided game of dodgeball. The robot, whose name stands for “assume this robot…

The Most Badass Robotic Bird On The Planet Just Got Better

Since 2007, researchers at the Maryland Robotics Center have been steadily upgrading Robo Raven, a super-realistic robotic bird that’s so lifelike it even fools the real thing. Its developers recently unveiled two new versions, including one that can take off by itself. https://gizmodo.com/the-robo-raven-is-so-lifelike-it-fools-birdbrains-511919948 Robo Raven — the brainchild of University of Maryland roboticist SK Gupta…

Some Of The Most Amazing Dirt Cheap Homemade Robots Ever Built

Robots have come a long way in the past few decades — but some of the coolest advances in robotics haven’t come from huge companies or massive university labs. Makers, inventors, tinkerers and builders have been creating some to-die-for robots for years now. Check out some videos of the very best DIY cheap robots. PET,…

What The Hell Is This Strange Green Glow Inside The Fukushima Plant?

A second robotic probe has investigated the interior of Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant. Using its onboard camera, it sent back eerie images of the plant’s interior, including what appears to be a mysterious green glow. Earlier this month, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) dispatched the first of the shape-shifting robots to survey the…

Inside the Experimental Robotics Lab Where Machines Are Getting Softer

Last week, an artificially intelligent robot scared me to death . The next day, I travelled to Carnegie Mellon University where I met a lab full of robots designed to do the exact opposite. Big, soft, and inflatable, these robots are Disney characters in real life. Your grandma’s going to love them. That’s the idea.…

This Movie’s Realistic AI Scared the Shit Out of Me

When I watched the trailer for Ex Machina, I was excited. It wasn’t just the uncanny and attractive robot Ava, either. There were androids, AI, Turing tests! This looked like the scifi movie of my dreams. But when I saw Ex Machina recently, I was terrified. Because it told the truth about what AI might…

Low Gravity Seriously Messes With An Ant’s Ability To Explore Space

Experiments aboard the International Space Station with common pavement ants have shown just how badly microgravity impairs the insects’ ability to search unexplored areas. Remarkably, however, tumbling ants demonstrated an uncanny ability to regain contact with the surface. There are over 20,000 species of ants on Earth, each perfectly suited to its environment. But there’s…

These 3D-Printed Ants Could Be the Factory Workers of the Future

These 3D-printed ants scuttle around much like the real thing. But loaded with sensors and wireless communication systems, they’re an experiment in collaborative robots—the kind of co-working that could fuel the factories of the future. New Scientist reports that these robots—each the size of a human hand—are loaded with stereo cameras on their heads, sensors…

A Robotic Arm So Advanced It Helps To Build Copies Of Itself

Behold the new UR3 robotic arm. Smaller, lighter, and more nimble than its predecessors, the Universal Robot-built arm can be programmed for a wide variety of tasks — including the construction of its own parts. Photo: Universal Robots Based out of Odense, Denmark, Universal Robots has added UR3 to its impressive line of industrial robotic…

Watch This Bipedal Robot Get Hammered With Dodgeballs

Introducing ATRIAS, a bipedal robot designed and built by Dynamic Robotics Labs. Its developers are optimistic that it’ll eventually become the world’s fastest two-legged robot. Until then, it’ll have to endure the physical abuse typically afforded robots these days. ATRIAS stands for “Assume The Robot Is A Sphere.” Alternately, the robot could have been named…

A Ten-Minute History of Robotics

Present-day robotics hasn’t turned out quite as the futurists intended: for better or worse, we don’t live in a world of robot butlers and Skynet. This ten-minute history of robotics does a nice job of explaining why. Fundamentally, of course, the truth is that robotics as a discipline is just… quite difficult. Some headaches that…

This Robotic Bird Can Swoop and Dive (Kinda) Like the Real Thing

Robotic birds are notoriously difficult to make, because the complex motion required brings mechanical weight penalties that are difficult to balance with the modest thrust of the flapping wings. But this new avian bot uses lightweight 3D-printed parts to reduce weight and turn it into an acrobat. Update: We actually wrote about a much earlier…

The Photographic History Of Robots As Restaurant Employees

We may think of robotic waitstaff as something that belongs to the future, but the truth is that robots have been serving people at restaurants since the 1980s. How well have these robot servers worked out? Here is a brief history of robot waiters over the last 30 years. Tanbo R-1 and Tambo R-2, two…

Anki’s Incredible Self-Driving Toy Cars Just Got Even Cooler

What’s better than a set of tiny artificially intelligent cars thatdrive themselvesaround a track while duking it out with lasers and tractor beams? Well, what if you could configure that track however you want? That’s the name of the game with Anki Overdrive, coming this September from the geniuses at robotics startup Anki. It’s pretty…

BattleBots Is Back After Ten Years, And It’s Bound To Be Incredible

Oh hell yes: BattleBots is coming back to TV. This summer, homemade robots will battle to the death on television, just as Asimov intended. They’ll be faster and stronger than ever before. Which makes sense, because the last time BattleBots was on television was over a decade ago. Imagine what they could do now. According…

Watch The U.S. Navy’s Fire-Fighting Robot Extinguish Its First Blaze

Called SAFFiR, the Navy’s humanoid robot prototype is designed to walk on uneven surfaces, use thermal imaging to locate overheated equipment, and operate a hose to extinguish fires aboard naval vessels. SAFFiR, which stands for Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot, stands 5 feet 10 inches and weighs 143 pounds. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) unveiled…

We’re fast approaching an era when companies will be able to run themselves. Called Distributed Autonomous Corporations (DACS), they’ll utilize cloud robots to manage supply chains without human supervision. But as an article at Aeon asks, will these blockchain-style systems set us free, or just make the rich richer?

Mad Scientists in Switzerland Built a Drone That Flies and Walks

Meet DALER. That’s short for Deployable Air-Land Exploration Robot, and it’s designed for rescuing victims in dangerous places after a natural disaster. How does a robot do that? Well, it requires flying into a dangerous place and then walks around that dangerous place. DALER does both. DALER was built by a team of scientists at…

ATLAS, The Pentagon’s Humanoid Robot, Just Got A Major Upgrade

Tremble at the sight of the new and improved ATLAS. Redesigned for DARPA by Boston Dynamics, this robot is now stronger, more energy efficient, more dextrous, and quieter than its clunky predecessor. And best of all, it no longer requires a safety tether. It’s called ATLAS Unplugged, and it’s the new standard that’ll be used…