Today’s advanced mobile robots explore complex terrains across the globe and even on Mars, but have difficulty traversing sand. A new study takes what may be the first detailed look at the problem of robot locomotion on granular surfaces. Among the study’s recommendations: robots attempting to move across sandy terrain should move their legs more [...]
Children with mobility issues, like cerebral palsy and spina bifida, can’t explore the world like other babies, because they can’t crawl or walk. Infant development emerges from the thousands of daily discoveries experienced by babies as they move and explore their worlds.
The day that robot playmates help children with autism learn the social skills that they naturally lack has come a step closer with the development of a system that allows a robot to monitor a child’s emotional state.
Scientists have managed to program clones that imitate the actions of humans playing soccer (known as football in the U.K.) on a computer. The clones learn the players’ behavior and apply this knowledge in order to avoid their opponents and score goals.
Small robots the size of riding mowers could prepare a safe landing site for NASA’s Moon outpost, according to a NASA-sponsored study.
Built from a simple Lego NXT kit, a new student-built robotic system can identify different types of dance and music in an intelligent independent manner. The next step is to create and manage choreography between humanoid robots.
Researchers have demonstrated how a robot can follow human gestures in a variety of environments — indoors and outside — without adjusting for lighting. The achievement is an important step forward in the quest to build fully autonomous robots as partners for human endeavors.
Scientists have used a popular kids swimming pool game to guide their development of a system for controlling moving robots that can autonomously detect and capture other moving targets.
Can the newly designed dashboard be easily installed? What paths should the assembly robot take so that the cables do not hit against the car body? A new software program simulates assembly paths and also factors in the pliability of components.
A humanoid robot will lead to a deeper understanding of human intelligence, scientists say. Researchers will test their theories about cognition by creating a computer simulation of a brain, which will replicate how neurons in real brains communicate through short bursts of electrical energy.