Enlarge / The Ekobot autonomous weeding robot roving around an onion field in Sweden. (credit: Ekobot AB)
Anybody who has pulled weeds in a garden knows that it's a tedious task. Scale it up to farm-sized jobs, and it becomes
To teach an AI agent a new task, like how to open a kitchen cabinet, researchers often use reinforcement learning — a trial-and-error process where the agent is rewarded for taking actions that get it closer to the goal.
In …
With 3D inkjet printing systems, engineers can fabricate hybrid structures that have soft and rigid components, like robotic grippers that are strong enough to grasp heavy objects but soft enough to interact safely with humans.
These multimaterial 3D printing systems …
Enlarge / A 2020 file photo of a Starship Technologies food delivery robot. Food is stored inside the robot's housing during transportation and opened upon delivery. (credit: Leon Neal/Getty Images)
On Tuesday, officials at Oregon State University issued a warning
Enlarge / In this still captured from a video provided by Nvidia, a simulated robot hand learns pen tricks, trained by Eureka, using simultaneous trials. (credit: Nvidia)
On Friday, researchers from Nvidia, UPenn, Caltech, and the University of Texas at
Anyone who has ever tried to pack a family-sized amount of luggage into a sedan-sized trunk knows this is a hard problem. Robots struggle with dense packing tasks, too.
For the robot, solving the packing problem involves satisfying many constraints, …
“As a child, I wished for a robot that would explain others’ emotions to me” says Sharifa Alghowinem, a research scientist in the Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group (PRG). Growing up in Saudi Arabia, Alghowinem says she dreamed of coming …
Imagine you want to carry a large, heavy box up a flight of stairs. You might spread your fingers out and lift that box with both hands, then hold it on top of your forearms and balance it against your …
Enlarge / A Google robot controlled by RT-2. (credit: Google)
On Friday, Google DeepMind announced Robotic Transformer 2 (RT-2), a "first-of-its-kind" vision-language-action (VLA) model that uses data scraped from the Internet to enable better robotic control through plain language commands.
Researchers from MIT and Stanford University have devised a new machine-learning approach that could be used to control a robot, such as a drone or autonomous vehicle, more effectively and efficiently in dynamic environments where conditions can change rapidly.
This …
Imagine purchasing a robot to perform household tasks. This robot was built and trained in a factory on a certain set of tasks and has never seen the items in your home. When you ask it to pick up a …
In the film “Top Gun: Maverick,” Maverick, played by Tom Cruise, is charged with training young pilots to complete a seemingly impossible mission — to fly their jets deep into a rocky canyon, staying so low to the …
Someone learning to play tennis might hire a teacher to help them learn faster. Because this teacher is (hopefully) a great tennis player, there are times when trying to exactly mimic the teacher won’t help the student learn. Perhaps the …
Enlarge / In a still from a DeepMind demo video, a researcher pushes a small humanoid robot to the ground. (credit: DeepMind)
On Wednesday, researchers from DeepMind released a paper ostensibly about using deep reinforcement learning to train miniature humanoid
If you've ever played soccer with a robot, it's a familiar feeling. Sun glistens down on your face as the smell of grass permeates the air. You look around. A four-legged robot is hustling toward you, dribbling with determination.
While …