In millions of years of evolution, nature has produced many sophisticated locomotor systems that engineers use as inspiration for creating better robots. We show some current technical developments that are highly advanced. Source: Robotics Tomorrow

Humans walk with straight legs and most robots don’t, but IHMC is teaching Atlas to do better Humanoid robots have a very distinctive walk. Knees bent, torso as stationary as possible. Even Boston Dynamics’ own Atlas uses this crouching sort of squat-walk to get around, because those perpetually bent legs are how it keeps from falling over. This sort of gait is so common with humanoid robots that it’s become the “normal” robot gait, but it’s also not at all the […]

“The Laughing Room,” an interactive art installation by author, illustrator, and MIT graduate student Jonathan “Jonny” Sun, looks like a typical living room: couches, armchairs, coffee table, soft lighting. This cozy scene, however, sits in a glass-enclosed space, flanked by bright lights and a microphone, with a bank of laptops and a video camera positioned across the room. People wander in, take a seat, begin chatting. After a pause in the conversation, a riot of canned laughter rings out, prompting genuine […]

Universal Robots marks a decade of pioneering collaborative robots, now the fastest-growing segment of industrial automation. The company is poised for continued growth as its cobots continue to lower the automation barrier within a wide range of industries. Source: Robotics Tomorrow

A robot that can detect a plant’s electrochemical signals goes where the plant wants it to go Cybernetics usually refers to humans enhancing themselves with robotic parts. Sometimes, we heard about animal-robot cyborgs, or insect-robot cyborgs. It’s not all that often that we hear about plant-robot cyborgs, because what’s a plant going to do with a robot, right? But you could argue that plants have the most to gain from robotic enhancements, because otherwise (with a few totally cool exceptions) […]

LiDAR offers a number of advantages over other perception solutions, enabling smart machines to “see” far distances and generate a 3D representation of their surrounding environment to detect obstacles and make intelligent navigation decisions. Source: Robotics Tomorrow