Robotics

MIT’s SANDO navigation system creates a time-aware safety corridor around moving hazards, helping drones avoid collisions while flying through unfamiliar terrain without a prior map. It could be useful for search and rescue, mine exploration, and more.

Researchers have developed a paper-thin foot membrane that lets crawling microrobots harvest electricity directly from the ground beneath them, ditching heavy onboard batteries by turning metal and silicon surfaces into an active power source.

Silk is slippery, shape-shifting, and unforgiving, which makes it a nightmare for a robot to handle. Chinese company Agilink has now shown a robotic hand taking it on, with a master embroiderer as its teacher.

The new light-guided swimmer uses one layer of living muscle to propel and steer itself through a Petri-dish maze. The thin design could one day help soft robots reach underwater spots rigid machines can't enter.

Eve, an exoskeleton by the French company Wandercraft, lets people with spinal-cord injuries stand and walk hands-free at home, no crutches or walker needed, so they can cook, open doors, and move on their own.

Before humanoid robots fully integrate into our societies and inhabit our homes and workspaces, a Japanese firm is thinking one step ahead. GMO has just unveiled a "Humanoid Ambulance" that it will roll out to handle maintenance tasks on-site.

The Ice Dart is a quadcopter designed by researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke in Quebec to solve a problem that has quietly limited drone science for years: there's almost nowhere safe to land in the harshest environments on Earth.

MIT engineers replaced excavator joysticks with a miniature-arm controller that mimics human arm motion, letting complete novices match veteran operators' skill level from their very first session, no years of practice required.

A few months ago, Chinese phone brand Honor teased one of the oddest concepts we've seen for a handset: it hid a folding robot arm attached to a camera. You can now buy one in China, and shoot Arri-grade footage with it.

The MegCell Pulse is a 3D-printable robotic system that can fit on any acoustic guitar and play music you feed it in a digital tablature format. With this, you can hear compositions rendered right in front of you, no speakers necessary.

The TerraMow X AWD ditches the in-place end-of-row pivot for a bi-directional "Shuttle Drive" system, pairing all-wheel drive and six-camera AI vision to mow steep, uneven, obstacle-strewn yards of up to 2.7 acres.

Jeff Bezos is gainfully employed once more, after having left his post as Amazon CEO back in 2021. The billionaire is now co-CEO at Project Prometheus, a startup that describes itself as building "AI for the physical economy."