Sometimes nature provides the best blueprints for building effective robots. It also can provide the best material. Billions of years of natural selection has built some pretty impressive machinery, s
Finally, something that makes climate change relatable.
There are countless reasons why home robots have found little success post-Roomba. Pricing, practicality, form factor and mapping have all contributed to failure after failure. Even when some or all o
MIT professor Mike Stonebraker has been at the forefront of database technology for more than 50 years. The former Turing Award winner invented the Ingres and Postgres databases and helped launch a nu
Metal 3D printing is already a multi-billion-dollar global industry. The additive manufacturing approach is poised to disrupt many facets of construction and will only continue to grow for the foresee
Will AI automate human jobs, and — if so — which jobs and when? That’s the trio of questions a new research study from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Labora
MIT likens a new vibrating capsule to drinking a glass full of water prior to eating. Dieticians recommend the latter as a method for sending signals to your brain to simulate the sensation of being f
Mention automation and someone will invariably (and understandably) mention its impact on jobs. There are a lot of opposing views on the subject, of course, but the one thing everyone seems to agree o
Reporting on tech requires a healthy dose of skepticism, hopefully tempered by some excitement about what can be done.
The initial research papers date back to 2018, but for most, the notion of liquid networks (or liquid neural networks) is a new one. It was “Liquid Time-constant Networks,” published at the tail e
Why aren’t there more robots in homes? This a surprising complex question — and our homes are surprisingly complex places. A big part of the reason autonomous systems are thriving on warehouse
A refrain I hear from a lot of startups is that there’s “no need to rethink the gripper.” It’s something I appreciate from an economic standpoint. It’s expensive, resource intensive and both
I wrote about half of last week’s Actuator on Wednesday in an empty office at MassRobotics after meeting with an early-stage startup. I’m not ready to tell you about them just yet, but they’re d
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
The startup economy has grown and shifted since the turn of the century, and universities — stocked with a never-ending supply of smart, ambitious young people — have increasingly taken part. Bost
“Jidoka” is a new one to me. TRI (Toyota Research Institute) CEO Gill Pratt described the concept as “Automation with a Human Touch.” The anglicized version of the notion is “Aut
Ingestible robotics has been a fascinating and growing field for the last several years. We’ve already seen a handful of startups working to commercialize a technology that could allow for internal
The age-old question in my industry is, “Where are we in a given hype cycle?” For now, crypto news cycle dominance has, thankfully, died now, largely through its own self-destructive tende
Here’s an interesting comment from MIT’s Alfonso Parra Rubio, “Treating soft versus hard robotics is a false dichotomy.” For, I suppose, obvious reasons, thinking around technology tends to be
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