Science Daily March 14, 2023 A team of researcers in the USA (Carnegie Mellon University, UCLA) has developed a multimodal soft robot locomotion using highly compact and dynamic bistable soft actuators. The actuators are composed of a prestretched membrane sandwiched between two 3D printed frames with embedded shape memory alloy (SMA) coils. The actuator can swiftly transform between two oppositely curved states and generate a force through a snap-through instability that is triggered after 0.2 s of electrical activation with an electrical energy input power. The consistency and robustness of the snap-through actuator response was experimentally validated through cyclical testing. […]
Tag Archives: Autonomous systems and robotics
Robots learn household tasks by watching humans
Phys.org July 22, 2022 Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a new learning method for robots called WHIRL, short for In-the-Wild Human Imitating Robot Learning. WHIRL is an efficient algorithm for one-shot visual imitation. It can learn directly from human-interaction videos and generalize that information to new tasks, making robots well-suited to learning household chores. With WHIRL, a robot can observe those tasks and gather the video data it needs to eventually determine how to complete the job itself. The robot watched as a researcher opened the refrigerator door. It recorded his movements, the swing of the door, the […]
A robot learns to imagine itself
Science Daily July 13, 2022 Internal computational models allow robots to consider outcomes of multiple possible future actions without trying them out in physical reality. Recent progress in fully data-driven self-modeling has enabled machines to learn their own forward kinematics directly from task-agnostic interaction data. However, forward kinematic models can only predict limited aspects of the morphology, such as the position of end effectors or velocity of joints and masses. A key challenge is to model the entire morphology and kinematics without prior knowledge of what aspects of the morphology will be relevant to future tasks. Researchers at Columbia University […]
AI Improves Robotic Performance in DARPA’s Machine Common Sense Program
DARPA News June 22, 2022 A team of researchers in the US(UC Berkeley, Oregon State University, University of Utah, University of Washington) working on DARPA’s Machine Common Sense (MCS) program demonstrated a series of improvements to robotic system performance over the course of multiple experiments. Just as infants must learn from experience, MCS seeks to construct computational models that mimic the core domains of child cognition for objects (intuitive physics), agents (intentional actors), and places (spatial navigation). Using only simulated training, recent MCS experiments demonstrated advancements in systems’ abilities – ranging from understanding how to grasp objects and adapting to […]
Robot overcomes uncertainty to retrieve buried objects
MIT News June 28, 2022 Researchers at MIT have built a prototype of a robotic system for RF-Visual mechanical search that leverages the mere existence of an RF-tagged item in the pile to benefit both tagged and untagged items. The two key innovations. RF-Visual Mapping, a technique that identifies and locates RF-tagged items in a pile and uses this information to construct an RF-Visual occupancy distribution map. The second innovation is RF-Visual Extraction, a policy formulated as an optimization problem that minimizes the number of actions required to extract the target object. In over 180 real-world experimental trials FuseBot outperformed […]
Robot ‘bugs’ that can go just about anywhere
Science Daily March 3, 2022 For many creatures under a certain size—like trap-jaw ants, mantis shrimp, and fleas—jumping across a surface is more energy-efficient than crawling. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh built a robot about the size of a cricket made of a polymeric artificial muscle and replicated such movements. The curved composite shape of the polymer muscle allows it to build energy when it is powered to move along moving surfaces like sand as easily as hard surfaces, and even to hop across water. High speed imaging reveals tip velocities of several 100 mm s−1 with powers approaching […]
Scientists develop insect-sized flying robots with flapping wings
Science Daily February 2, 2022 Current flapping MAVs require transmission systems between their actuators and wings, which introduce energetic losses and additional mass, hindering performance. Researchers in the UK have developed a high-performance electrostatic flapping actuation system, the liquid-amplified zipping actuator (LAZA), which induces wing movement by direct application of liquid-amplified electrostatic forces at the wing root, eliminating the requirement of any transmission system and their associated downsides. Thrust up to 5.73 millinewtons was achieved while consuming only 243 milliwatts of electrical power, implying a thrust-to-power ratio of 23.6 newtons per kilowatt, like state-of-the-art flapping MAVs, helicopter rotors, and commercial […]
How organic neuromorphic electronics can think and act
Science Daily December 13, 2021 In living organisms, sensory and motor processes are distributed, locally merged, and capable of forming dynamic sensorimotor associations. An international team of researchers (the Netherlands, Germany, USA – Stanford University, UK, Saudi Arabia, Italy) has developed a simple and efficient organic neuromorphic circuit for local sensorimotor merging and processing on a robot that is placed in a maze. While the robot is exposed to external environmental stimuli, visuomotor associations are formed on the adaptable neuromorphic circuit. With this on-chip sensorimotor integration, the robot learns to follow a path to the exit of a maze, while […]
Teaching robots to think like us
Science Daily October 26, 2021 Researchers in Japan have taught a robot to navigate through a maze by electrically stimulating a culture of brain nerve cells connected to the machine. The neurons were grown from living cells and acted as the physical reservoir for the computer to construct coherent signals. The signals are regarded as homeostatic signals, telling the robot the internal environment was being maintained within a certain range and acting as a baseline as it moved freely through the maze. Throughout trials, the robot was continually fed the homeostatic signals interrupted by the disturbance signals until it had […]
Scientists create rechargeable swimming microrobots using oil and water
Science Daily July 15, 2021 Many microorganisms exploit the fact that elasticity breaks the time-reversal symmetry of motion at low Reynolds numbers, but this principle has been notably absent from model systems of active, self-propelled micro swimmers. An international team of researchers (Bulgaria, Poland, UK) has introduced a class of micro swimmers that spontaneously self-assembles and swims without using external forces, driven instead by surface phase transitions induced by temperature variations. The swimmers are made from alkane droplets dispersed in an aqueous surfactant solution, which start to self-propel on cooling, pushed by rapidly growing thin elastic tails. When heated, the […]