CSAIL

Here’s a fun challenge: teaching a quadrupedal robot to successfully dribble a soccer ball. It is, in essence, a core component of RoboCup, the big international competition founded all the way back

A new approach to vaccines with a machine learning twist could put an end to boosters and seasonal variant shots, according to MIT researchers. This “pan-variant” vaccine would ignore the

While artificial intelligence long ago surpassed human capability in chess, and more recently Go — and let us not forget Doom — other more complex board games still present a challenge to computer

A few years ago, I got in the habit of asking researchers the titular question: Are universities doing enough to foster robotics startups? To a one, the answer was invariably, “no.” It was a massi

The MIT CSAIL team calls them “banana fingers,” and I can’t really disagree. They’re oblong and bright yellow, but as visually arresting as they are at first glance, they do serve a function.

A disproportionate number of the early industrial food-making robots we’ve seen have been focused on pizza. I’ve long posited that this is for two key reasons. First: People like pizza. We eat a l

A nice secondary effect of writing this newsletter is getting an influx of responses when I write on a specific topic. Last week it was agtech. I expressed a bit of disappointment in the category. So

This is always a strange week — that liminal space between the Christmas holiday and New Year. Romjul — or “Dead Week” — as they call it in Norway (thanks Haje). It’s a time fo

Once I was recovered from the initial surrealism of Amazon launching its own home robot, I immediately thought about iRobot. The company cornered the home robotics market a decade ago, and while there

Politeness doesn’t really amount to much when you’re programmed to get from point A to point B. But if robots are going to play an increased role in human society, questions arise around how preci

Granted, there aren’t many cities where self-driving water taxis are a viable option, but Amsterdam may just be one of those places. This week, scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artif

MIT CSAIL spinout Inkbit this week announced that it has raised $30 million. The Series B, led by Phoenix Venture Partners LLC, brings the firm’s total funding up to $45 million. PVP joins existing

Alt-Bionics made waves back in late 2019 when the brand new startup competed at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Tech Symposium. The company finished second to 3BM’s infrared paint-curi

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from some of our favorite YouTube shitty robots, it’s that human-robot interaction can be a tricky business. Developing methods to get rigid robotic arms to pe

The sub-category of soft robotics has transformed the way many think about the field. Oft-influenced by natural phenomenon, the technology offers a dramatically different approach than the sort of rig

Additive manufacturing has proven an ideal solution for certain tasks, but the technology still lacks more traditional methods in a number of categories. One of the biggest is the requirement for post

James Cox spent much of his professional career at Uber trying to crack the problem of how to reduce congestion through ridesharing. As one of the architects of the Uber Pool service and a longtime pr

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has shared the results of a new project in which it built a two-fingered robotic gripper, which has soft pads for dedicated and fin

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has put one of its research projects to work providing disinfection services for The Greater Boston Food Bank (GBFB), in an effort

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented an unprecedented challenge for healthcare workers. Among the major challenges are social distancing issues, which have required novel approaches to diagnosing and t