This morning, drone delivery company Zipline announced a new drone delivery system offering nearly silent, precise delivery that’s intended to expand the company’s capabilities into home delivery. This requires a much different approach from what Zipline has been doing for the past 8 years. In order to make home deliveries that are quiet and precise, Zipline has developed a creative new combination of hybrid drones, droids, and all the supporting hardware necessary to make deliveries directly to your front porch. […]

The world emits 51 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year. To solve the climate crisis, we need to cut this in half by 2030, and get to zero by 2050. For electricity generation, this means the United States alone needs to increase renewable-energy capacities by 10 times over the next 12 years, which roughly translates to a mind-boggling 400,000 more wind turbines and 2.5 billion more solar panels. To accelerate this progress, Congress has recently passed […]

Today, a robotics startup called Figure is unveiling “the world’s first commercially viable general purpose humanoid robot,” called Figure 01. Shown in the rendering above, Figure 01 does not yet exist, but according to this morning’s press release, it will “have the ability to think, learn, and interact with its environment and is designed for initial deployment into the workforce to address labor shortages and over time lead the way in eliminating the need for unsafe and undesirable jobs.” Which […]

What could you do with an extra limb? Consider a surgeon performing a delicate operation, one that needs her expertise and steady hands—all three of them. As her two biological hands manipulate surgical instruments, a third robotic limb that’s attached to her torso plays a supporting role. Or picture a construction worker who is thankful for his extra robotic hand as it braces the heavy beam he’s fastening into place with his other two hands. Imagine wearing an exoskeleton that […]

Three days before astronauts left on Apollo 8, the first-ever flight around the moon, NASA’s safety chief, Jerome Lederer, gave a speech that was at once reassuring and chilling. Yes, he said, America’s moon program was safe and well-planned—but even so, “Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and one and one half million systems, subsystems, and assemblies. Even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects.” The mission, in December 1968, was nearly flawless—a prelude to the […]

When we hear about manipulation robots in warehouses, it’s almost always in the context of picking. That is, about grasping a single item from a bin of items, and then dropping that item into a different bin, where it may go towards building a customer order. Picking a single item from a jumble of items can be tricky for robots (especially when the number of different items may be in the millions) and while the problem’s not certainly not solved, […]

In the late 1980s, Rod Brooks and Anita Flynn published a paper in The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society with the amazing title of Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: A Robotic Invasion of the Solar System. The paper explored the idea that instead of sending one big and complicated and extremely expensive robot to explore (say) the surface of Mars, you could instead send a whole bunch of little and simple and extremely cheap robots, while still accomplishing […]

All things considered, we humans are kind of big, which is very limiting to how we can comfortably interact with the world. The practical effect of this is that we tend to prioritize things that we can see and touch and otherwise directly experience, even if those things are only a small part of the world in which we live. A recent study conservatively estimates that there are 2.5 million ants for every one human on Earth. And that’s just […]

It’s been a couple of years, but the IEEE Spectrum Robot Gift Guide is back for 2022! We’ve got all kinds of new robots, and right now is an excellent time to buy one (or a dozen), since many of them are on sale this week. We’ve tried to focus on consumer robots that are actually available (or that you can at least order), but depending on when you’re reading this guide, the prices we have here may not be […]

Luxonis, a sensor company best known for their OAK line of stereo depth cameras, has decided to take a crack at something a little more complicated and a lot more RGB. They’ve just launched a Kickstarter for Rae, a pint-sized open source mobile robot with an integrated depth camera that combines accessible apps with ROS 2 and is somehow also kind of affordable. “Rae,” which is technically “rae” but I can’t bring myself to not capitalize it, stands for “robotics […]