Despite the fact they are small cubes with no exterior moving parts, M-Blocks robots can propel themselves forward, jump on top of each other, and snap together to form more complex shapes. What makes them different from other examples of modular robotic cubes we previously wrote about is their simplicity because MIT researchers decided to… »
Building blocks from our childhood and our imagination enabled us to create new worlds and explore different ways to use what we had at our disposal. A year ago, Modular Robotics came up with Cubelets – simple robotic cubes which serve as building blocks that behave differently depending on how you connect them, like a… »
Researchers at the University of Bristol developed computer vision algorithms that enable creation of real-time 3D visual maps which enable Samsung‘s humanoid robot named Roboray to move around more efficiently. Rapid 3D visual mapping is essential for faster operation of humanoid robots because it provides them with ability to robustly track and recover from rapid… »
The Robotics and Cybernetics Research Group at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid interest in development of robots able to move in environments with uneven ground ended up with ROSPHERE – a robot without wheels or legs which has a single spherical form and rolls itself to conduct the missions. During its assessment, the robot has… »
While photos and videos of the robot have been presented at scientific conferences in robotics and in infant development, the general public recently got the first glance at the expressive face of a robot named Diego-san. The project is led by a researcher from University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and it will be used… »
It seems as if last year’s news and articles were dominated by unmanned aerial vehicles and algorithms developed for their autonomy in different environments. We got a couple of new and affordable robotic toys to play with, there were numeral examples of robots whose design or locomotion principles were inspired by nature, and ASIMO turned… »
A group of researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a new microscale actuator which could find its application in novel microfluidics, drug delivery, and artificial muscles. The actuators are smaller than the width of a human hair and are based on an oxide material… »
Many research groups around the world have been inspired by swarms and they have been striving to develop suitable platforms and different algorithms. A group of researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder has developed a basic robotic building block called droplet, and they hope they’ll be able to reproduce it in large quantities to… »
