MIT News November 19, 2024 Fast and accurate physics simulation is an essential component of robot learning, where robots can explore failure scenarios that are difficult to produce in the real world and learn from unlimited on-policy data. Yet, it remains challenging to incorporate RGB-color perception into the sim-to-real pipeline that matches the real world in its richness and realism. Researchers at MIT trained a robot dog in simulation for visual parkour. They proposed a way to use generative models to synthesize diverse and physically accurate image sequences of the scene from the robot’s ego-centric perspective. They presented demonstrations of […]
Tag Archives: Robotics
Invisible touch: Researchers give AI the ability to feel and measure surfaces
Phys.org November 18, 2024 Researchers at Stevens Institute explored a novel approach to surface roughness metrology utilizing a single pixel, raster scanning single photon counting LiDAR system. It used a collimated laser beam in picosecond pulses to probe a surface, capturing the changes of back-scattered photons from different points on the surface into a single mode fiber, and counted them using a single photon detector. The back-scattered photons carried speckle noise produced by the rough surface, and the variation in photon counts over different illumination points across the surface becoming a good measure of its roughness. By analyzing the variation […]
Self-propelled shape-changing robots mimic aquatic insects for untethered swimming
Nanowerk October 8, 2024 Despite recent advances in the field of small-scale robots, the development of efficient, untethered, and integrated powering, actuation, and control of small-scale robots remains a challenge due to the out-of-equilibrium and dissipative nature of the driving physical and chemical phenomena. An international team of researchers (USA – University of Michigan, Canada) designed small-scale, bioinspired aquatic locomotors with programmable deterministic trajectories that integrated self-propelled chemical motors and photoresponsive shape-morphing structures. They developed robots integrating structural protein networks that self-regulated the release of chemical fuel with photochemical liquid crystal network (LCN) actuators that changed their shape and deformed […]
MIT engineers design tiny batteries for powering cell-sized robots
MIT News August 15, 2024 The use of wet chemistry in battery technologies limits their potential to be scaled down beyond millimeters in size. A team of researchers in the US (MIT, University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan) photolithographically patterned a microscale zinc/platinum/SU-8 system to generate the highest energy density microbattery at the picoliter scale. The device scavenges ambient or solution-dissolved oxygen for a zinc oxidation reaction, achieving an energy density ranging from 760 to 1070 watt-hours per liter at scales below 100 micrometers lateral and 2 micrometers thickness in size. The processes allow 10,000 devices per wafer to be […]
‘Invisible tweezers’ use robotics and acoustic energy to achieve what human hands cannot
Science Daily May 24, 2024 Existing robotic platforms have difficulty achieving contactless, high-resolution, 4-degrees-of-freedom (4-DOF) manipulation of small objects, and noninvasive maneuvering of objects in regions shielded by tissue and bone barriers. A team of researchers in the US (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, University of North Carolina, University of Michigan) has developed programmable, chirality-tunable acoustic vortex tweezers that could tune acoustic vortex chirality, transmit through biological barriers, trap single micro- to millimeter-sized objects, and control object rotation. Assisted by programmable robots, the acoustic systems further enabled contactless, high-resolution translation of single objects. They demonstrated the systems by tuning […]
Battery-free robots use origami to change shape in mid-air
Science Daily September 13, 2023 Researchers at the University of Washington designed origami battery-free microfliers using bistable leaf-out structures and found that a simple change in the shape of the origami structures caused two dramatically different falling behaviors. When unfolded and flat, the microfliers exhibited a tumbling behavior that increased lateral displacement in the wind. When folded inward, their orientation was stabilized, resulting in a downward descent that was less influenced by wind. To electronically transition between these two shapes, they designed a low-power electromagnetic actuator that produced peak forces of up to 200 millinewtons within 25 milliseconds while powered […]
Researchers build bee robot that can twist
Science Daily May 23, 2023 A team of researchers in the US (UCLA, industries, Washington State University) has developed a an insect-scale flying robot, Bee ++, driven by four independently actuated flapping wings using new method for synthesizing and implementing high-performance six-degree-of-freedom (6 -DOF) flight controllers. Each wing of the Bee ++ was installed with a preset orientation enabling reliable roll, pitch, and yaw torque generation, and a Lyapunov-based nonlinear control architecture that enabled closed-loop position and attitude regulation and tracking. The control algorithms stabilize position and attitude by independently varying the wing stroke amplitudes of the four flapping wings. […]
This Incredible Tiny Robot Can Locate And Capture Individual Cells
Science Alert April 8, 2023 While dielectrophoretic (DEP)-based cargo manipulation can be achieved at high-solution conductivity, electrical propulsion of these micromotors becomes ineffective at solution conductivities. Researchers in Israel found that combination of a rotating magnetic field and electric field results in enhanced micromotor mobility and steering control through tuning of the electric field frequency. They demonstrated the micromotor’s ability of identifying apoptotic cell among viable and necrotic cells based on their dielectrophoretic difference. This enabled analysis of apoptotic status in the single-cell samples for drug discovery, cell therapeutics, and immunotherapy. According to the researcher’s hybrid micromotor approach for label-free […]
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 […]
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 […]