Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos Image: NASA Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!): RoboCup 2018 – June 18-22, 2018 – Montreal, Canada RSS 2018 – June 26-30, 2018 – Pittsburgh, Pa., USA Ubiquitous Robots 2018 – June 27-30, 2018 – Honolulu, Hawaii MARSS 2018 – July 4-8, 2018 – Nagoya, Japan […]

Knowing how to give good hugs is an important life skill, even for robots Image: Alexis Block Hugs make us feel warm and safe and comforted and loved. They’re pretty great, if you’re into that sort of thing. If we need a hug and another human isn’t available, we can sometimes get a little bit of satisfaction from hugging inanimate objects like stuffed animals, but it seems like robots (that can hypothetically hug us back) might be able to be […]

Using steerable jets of water like rockets, this robot snake can fly into burning buildings to extinguish fires Image: Tohoku University/National Institute of Technology Fires have an unfortunate habit of happening in places that aren’t necessarily easy to reach. Whether the source of the fire is somewhere deep within a building, or up more than a floor or two, or both, firefighters have few good options for tackling them. They can either pour water into windows (which doesn’t always work […]

An attacker could manipulate medical software to rig a clinical trial or justify unnecessary procedures Illustration: iStockphoto Artificial intelligence systems meant to analyze medical images are vulnerable to attacks designed to fool them in ways that are imperceptible to humans, a new study warns. There may be enormous incentives to carry out such attacks for healthcare fraud and other nefarious ends, the researchers say. “The most striking thing to me as a researcher crafting these attacks was probably how easy […]

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos Photo: TelexistenceTokyo-based robotics startup Telexistence unveils its Model H robot and control system. Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!): RoboCup 2018 – June 18-22, 2018 – Montreal, Canada RSS 2018 – June 26-30, 2018 – Pittsburgh, Pa., USA Ubiquitous Robots 2018 – June […]

Robots learn to modify their environment to make the impossible possible Photo: University of Pennsylvania/ModLab There’s an expectation in robotics that in order to be useful, robots have to be able to adapt to unstructured environments. Unstructured environments generally refer to places outside of a robotics lab or other controlled or semi-controlled situation, and could include anything from your living room to a tropical rainforest. An enormous amount of effort and creativity goes into designing robots that can reliably operate […]

Miniature robots cloaked in platelets and red blood cells can clear bacterial infections in the blood Image: Esteban-Fernández de Ávila/ Science RoboticsMRSA bacteria (spheres) attached to the biohybrid nanorobots. Researchers have come up with all sorts of ways to propel tiny robots deep into the human body to perform tasks, such as delivering drugs and taking biopsies. Now, there’s a nanorobot that can clean up infections in blood.  Directed by ultrasound, the tiny robots, made of gold nanowires with a biological coating, dart around blood,  attach to bacteria, and […]

With spinning hoops to detect obstacles combined with electromagnetic braking, this quadrotor safety system is both effective and cheap Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum Quadrotors have a reputation for being both fun and expensive, but it’s not usually obvious how dangerous they can be. While it’s pretty clear from the get-go that it’s in everyone’s best interest to avoid the spinny bits whenever possible, quadrotor safety primarily involves doing little more than trying your level best not to run into people. […]

An ingestible capsule pairs bacteria with electronics to monitor blood in the GI tract Photo: Lillie Paquette/MIT School of Engineering In the latest edition of “What would you be willing to swallow?”, researchers at MIT today unveiled an ingestible sensor that combines engineered bacteria with ultra-low-power microelectronics to sense changes in the gut. The sensor, roughly the size of a large pen cap, needs to undergo miniaturization and further study before it can be used in humans, but the team […]

Got a great idea for an app to help people deal with a natural disaster? Call for Code wants to hear from you Illustrations: iStockphoto and Shutterstock The United Nations’ Human Rights Office, the American Red Cross, the David Clark Cause, and IBM today announced Call for Code, a contest seeking applications that address natural disasters—aiding either prevention, response, or recovery.  The disasters of 2017—fires, floods, earthquakes, and storms—stretched the capacity of traditional response methods, and sparked the United Nations […]

Disney Research is teaching this skinny robot how to perform a variety of somersaulting stunts Image: Disney Research This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Olympic gymnast Simone Biles has a signature move that is named after her because she is the only woman on earth capable of performing it. The move starts as a layout double flip, but more than […]

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos Image: Flash Robotics via YouTube Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!): ICRA 2018 – May 21-25, 2018 – Brisbane, Australia Dynamic Walking Conference – May 21-24, 2018 – Pensacola, Fla., USA RoboCup 2018 – June 18-22, 2018 – Montreal, Canada RSS 2018 – June 26-30, […]