From the Sojourner rover, which landed on Mars in 1997, to Perseverance, which touched down in February, the robots of the Red Planet share a defining feature: wheels. Rolling is far more stable and energy efficient than walking, which even robots on Earth still struggle to master. After all, NASA would hate for its very […]

Soria’s team tested the new approach against a state-of-the-art reactive model on a simulation with five drones and eight obstacles, and confirmed their hunch. In one scenario, reactive swarms finished their mission in 34.1 seconds—the predictive one finished in 21.5. Next came the real demonstration. Soria’s team gathered small Crazyflie quadcopters used by researchers. Each […]

Robots also lack the kind of intelligence, manual dexterity, and people skills that any good cook, host, or server relies on to keep their diners happy. Can Peanut talk down a customer who’s irate because their eggs were fried instead of scrambled? Can it deftly plate a tuna tartare and avocado tower, and do a […]

When sea snakes swim, they wind their way through the water by flicking their flattened tails, which is super graceful but requires a whole lot of coordination. So when roboticists at Carnegie Mellon University decided that it was time for their landlubbing robot snake to take to the water, they took a shortcut. They approximated […]

WIRED: I wanted to talk about navigating relationships with home or companion robots, especially when it comes to empathy and actually developing pretty complex relationships. What can we learn from what we’ve been doing for thousands of years with pets? KD: One of the things that we’ve learned by looking at the history of pets […]

Imagine for a moment that you have suction cups for fingertips—unless you’re currently on hallucinogens, in which case you should not imagine that. Each sucker is a different size and flexibility, making one fingertip ideal for sticking onto a flat surface like cardboard, another more suited to a round thing like a ball, another better […]

It can’t do back flips like Atlas the humanoid robot, nor can it dance or open doors for its friends, like Spot the robotic dog can. Instead, Boston Dynamics’ new robot, named Stretch, is going straight to work in a warehouse. Rolling around on a wheeled base, it’s basically a large robotic arm that grabs […]

Sure, evolution invented mammals that soar 200 feet through the air on giant flaps of skin and 3-foot-wide crabs that climb trees, but has it ever invented a four-legged animal with telescoping limbs? No, it has not. Biology can’t really work that way. But robots certainly can. Meet the Dynamic Robot for Embodied Testing, aka […]

While bees, birds, and ants swarm together to mate or protect themselves against predators, these worms are able to braid themselves together to accomplish tasks that unconnected individuals can’t handle. They live at the bottom of freshwater ponds, feeding on bacteria and other microorganisms. During periods of sustained drought, when the water in the ponds […]

In the GIF below, we see Bluebots trying another task: a search mission. This behavior is a bit more complex, guided by a few separate directives in the algorithm. The first step is known as dispersion; the algorithm directs the robots to keep away from one another. This spreads them out in search of their […]

In the GIF below, we see Bluebots trying another task: a search mission. This behavior is a bit more complex, guided by a few separate directives in the algorithm. The first step is known as dispersion; the algorithm directs the robots to keep away from one another. This spreads them out in search of their […]

Study hard enough, kids, and maybe one day you’ll grow up to be a professional robot fighter. A few years ago, Boston Dynamics set the standard for the field by having people wielding hockey sticks try to keep Spot the quadrupedal robot from opening a door. Previously, in 2015, the far-out federal research agency Darpa […]

Anderson and her colleagues went a step further and programmed the Smellicopter to hunt for odors just like an actual moth would. If you’re able to smell an odor, there’s a good chance that the source is upwind from you. The same goes for insects like moths, who do something called cross-wind casting, in which […]

Established aerospace companies like Airbus and startups like Zunum have been working on electrifying passenger aircraft for years. But even if they’re successful, packing a plane full of conventional cells has some major safety risks. A short circuit in a large battery pack could cause a disastrous fire or explosion. “The aerospace sector is very […]

It’s impossible to talk about Boston Dynamics robots without acknowledging two things: They’re a marvel of modern engineering, and their agility can be incredibly unnerving. A 46-second video of Spot the robot “dog” opening a door has more than 56 million views on YouTube. Atlas, the company’s headless humanoid robot, can go for a jog […]

No two ice sheets have ever been laid down the exact same way, both because of this random bumpiness, and because of the quality of the water used, which can affect the way the liquid hardens into a surface. Accordingly, human curlers are allowed to take practice throws before a match to get a feel […]

Spot, Boston Dynamics’ famous robot dog, dutifully follows my every command. The machine traipses forward, then automatically scrambles over a raised bed of rocks. I make it side-step. I command it up a flight of stairs, which it tackles with ease. It meets its match when I steer it at a medicine ball, though; it […]

In order to understand how a gait looks, though, the robot needs objective data, not subjective judgements. So the researchers used algorithms that analyzed videos of the people walking, with each person’s image overlaid by a skeleton with 16 joints, including at the neck, shoulders, and knees. Then, they used deep learning algorithms to get […]