MIT News June 5, 2019 An international team of researchers (USA – MIT, the Netherlands) is working on Roboat to build a fleet of autonomous robotic boats devised to transport people and goods similar to self-driving cars. The design dynamically links and joins multiple boats into one unit in order to form floating infrastructure such as bridges, markets or concert stages, as well as autonomously self-detach to perform individual tasks. They developed a novel latching system that enables robotic boats to create dynamic united floating infrastructure while overcoming water disturbances. The roboats run on custom computer vision and control techniques […]
Category Archives: Autonomous systems and robotics
Meet the robot submarine that acts as a lionfish predator
MIT Technology Review June 4, 2019 A non-profit organization has developed a robot submarine called the Guardian LF1 which features eight thrusters, an onboard computer, a camera, and a power source, along with a set of low voltage “stunning panels” and a chamber for storing captured fish. It is controlled from the surface using a tether but includes an autopilot and a computer vision system capable of distinguishing lionfish from other species. The prey, Lionfish, native to the Indo-Pacific Ocean, were introduced to the waters off the US several decades ago and have since spread through the Caribbean and Gulf […]
Engineers create a robot that can ‘imagine’ itself
Science Daily January 30, 2019 Researchers at Columbia University have created a robot that learns what it is, from scratch, with zero prior knowledge of physics, geometry, or motor dynamics. After a brief period of “babbling,” and within about a day of intensive computing, the robot creates a self-simulation and uses that self-simulator internally to contemplate and adapt to different situations, handling new tasks as well as detecting and repairing damage in its own body. Using a four-degree-of-freedom articulated robotic arm, initially the robot moved randomly and collected approximately one thousand trajectories. Then used deep learning to create a self-model. […]
Shape-shifting robots perceive surroundings, make decisions for first time
Science Daily November 1, 2018 A team of researchers in the US (Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania) has developed a modular robot system capable of autonomously completing high-level tasks by reactively reconfiguring to meet the needs of a perceived, a priori unknown environment. The system integrates perception, high-level planning, and modular hardware and is validated in three hardware demonstrations. Given a high-level task specification, a modular robot autonomously explores an unknown environment, decides when and how to reconfigure, and manipulates objects to complete its task. The research has begun to lay the groundwork for modular self-reconfigurable robots to address tasks […]
Insect-Inspired Vision System Helps Drones Pass Through Small Gaps
IEEE Spectrum September 11, 2018 Insects are quite good at not running into things, and just as good at running into things and surviving, but targeted, accurate precision flight is much more difficult for them. Reliable and not taking much to execute is one way to summarize the focus of the next generation of practical robotics. Researchers at the University of Maryland has developed a system that allows a drone to fly through very small and completely unknown gaps using a single camera and onboard processing. The drone has no information about the location or size of the gap in […]
Robot-bat, ‘Robat,’ uses sound to navigate and map a novel environment
Science Daily September 6, 2018 An international team of researchers (Israel, Switzerland) developed ‘Robat’—a fully autonomous bat-like terrestrial robot that relies on echolocation to move through a novel environment while mapping it solely based on sound. Using the echoes reflected from the environment, the Robat delineates the borders of objects it encounters, and classifies them using an artificial neural-network, thus creating a rich map of its environment. Unlike most previous attempts to apply sonar in robotics, they focus on a biological bat-like approach, which relies on a single emitter and two ears, and they apply a biological plausible signal processing […]
Aerial robot that can morph in flight
Science Daily May 31, 2018 Researchers in France have designed a flying robot called Quad-Morphing which has two rotating arms each equipped with two propellers for helicopter-like flight. A system of elastic and rigid wires allows the robot to change the orientation of its arms in flight so that they are either perpendicular or parallel to its central axis. It adopts the parallel position, halving its wingspan, to traverse a narrow stretch and then switches back to perpendicular position to stabilize its flight, all while flying at a speed of 9 km/h. It paves the way for a new generation […]
No Motor, No Battery, No Problem
Caltech May 15, 2018 An international team of researchers (Switzerland, USA – Caltech) has developed robots that paddle through water as the material they are constructed from deforms with temperature changes. The new propulsion system relies on strips of a flexible polymer that is curled when cold and stretches out when warm. The polymer is positioned to activate a switch inside the robot’s body, that is in turn attached to a paddle that rows it forward like a rowboat. The switch is made from a bistable element, which is a component that can be stable in two distinct geometries… read […]
Modeling Uncertainty Helps MIT’s Drone Zip Around Obstacles
IEEE Spectrum February 12, 2018 Researchers at MIT have developed a new motion planning framework called NanoMap, which uses a sequence of 3D snapshots to allow fast-moving (10 m/s) drones to safely navigate around obstacles even if they’re not entirely sure where they are. The key idea of NanoMap is to store a history of noisy relative pose transforms and search over a corresponding set of depth sensor measurements for the minimum-uncertainty view of a queried point in space… read more. Video.
Smart Swarms Seek New Ways to Cooperate
Quanta Magazine February 14, 2018 Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are experimenting with flapping robots called “smarticles” which can’t move on their own. But when a lot of these objects are put together they start to work as a unit. Researchers are learning how to control these systems so that when the swarm comes together, its members can carry out complex behaviors without any centralized direction. Other efforts in the field of self-organizing robots include “droplet-size robots” being developed at the University of Colorado, “Kilobot swarms” at Harvard University, and “swarmanoids” out of a pioneering lab in Belgium… […]