Machine learning happens a lot like erosion. Data is hurled at a mathematical model like grains of sand skittering across a rocky landscape. Some of those grains simply sail along with little or no impact. But some of them make their mark: testing, hardening, and ultimately reshaping the landscape according to inherent patterns and fluctuations […]
A team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the University of California, Irvine constructed a robot leg that, like its natural model, is very energy efficient. BirdBot benefits from a foot-leg coupling through a network of muscles and tendons that extends across multiple joints. In this way, BirdBot needs fewer […]
Researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have demonstrated for the first time how to use a type of material called a liquid crystal to build the basic pieces needed for logic operations, clearing the way for a completely new manner of computing. The findings, which were published in Science Advances […]
A new risk analysis, published today in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, warns that the future use of artificial intelligence in agriculture comes with substantial potential risks for farms, farmers and food security that are poorly understood and under-appreciated. “The idea of intelligent machines running farms is not science fiction. Large companies are already pioneering the next […]
Xu and colleagues report on laboratory tests in which they employed an array of commercially available solar cells to develop an optimal lens-free system for high-speed optical detection underwater in the Optica Publishing Group journal Optics Letters. Photodiodes, which have traditionally been utilized as detectors in wireless optical communication, have a much smaller detecting area […]
A University of Bristol team has created a new driving system for flapping-wing autonomous robots, which uses an electromechanical zipping mechanism that eliminates the need for conventional motors and gears. This new advance, published today in the journal Science Robotics, could pave the way for smaller, lighter and more effective micro flying robots for environmental monitoring, […]
A new fabrication technique produces low-voltage, power-dense artificial muscles that improve the performance of flying micro robots. Bigger isn’t necessarily better when it comes to robots.A swarm of insect-sized robots could one day fertilize a wheat field or hunt for survivors among the ruins of a fallen building. Drones that can zip around with bug-like […]
“You’ll see robotic hands do a power grasp and a precision grasp and then kind of imply that they can do everything in between,” said Wilson Ruotolo, PhD ’21, a former graduate student in the Biomimetics and Dextrous Manipulation Lab at Stanford University. “What we wanted to address is how to create manipulators that are […]