Robots

If you say “jump” I say “how high?” – and a new robot from UC Santa Barbara says “over 100 ft.” The researchers say that’s higher than anything else has ever jumped, be it robot or animal, thanks to a unique design that multiplies its stored energy.

The West Japan Rail Company has released video of its new humanoid heavy equipment robot. Mounted on the end of a crane, this gundam-style robot torso mimics the arm and head motions of a human pilot, who sees through the robot's eyes via VR goggles.

In a typical sailboat race, the course is marked with a series of buoys that have to be anchored to the seabed, and which may get pushed around by winds or currents. MarkSetBot addresses those problems, with internet-connected robotic buoys.

Harvesting sea urchins by hand can be tricky, often resulting in painful pokes through diving gloves. That's where the C Disc and the C Bud come in, as both systems vacuum urchins off the seabed and into a boat, net or shore-located container.

MIT's mini cheetah robot has reached its fastest speed yet, hitting 8.72 mph thanks to a new model-free reinforcement learning system that allows the robot to figure out on its own the best way to run and allows it to adapt to different terrain.

Kawasaki Heavy Industries has plenty of experience mass-producing industrial robots, and now we get to see some of its early progress into service robots, multi-purpose humanoids, and, for some reason, a rather silly-looking ride-on robot goat.

Researchers at Harvard and Emory have created a biohybrid fish out of human heart cells that swims autonomously for months at a time as the cells beat. The project is a sidestep on the way to eventually growing new functional hearts for transplant.

Most robots are designed for a specific job, and aren’t very adaptable. But a new soft robot can morph into a range of shapes for driving, flying or swimming, thanks to a rubber skin full of a metal that switches between liquid and solid forms.

No matter how good our human designs may be, there’s no shame in copying Mother Nature’s homework. A new nature-inspired flying robot can flap its wings even more efficiently than an insect, using a unique electrostatic “zipping” mechanism.

If you were building a wooden structure by hand, it would be hard to lift the wooden components, place them in alignment, then keep them aligned as they were glued together. That's why a Swiss team is using robots to shoulder much of the workload.

Nature is an endless source of inspiration for robot design. Engineers at Stanford have now developed robotic claws inspired by the talons of a falcon, letting drones perch on many different surfaces, as well as grabbing or catching objects.

Scientists have developed first-of-a-kind "Xenobots" from frog cells with the ability to self-replicate, a technology that could find use in regenerative medicine and and reveals a type of biological reproduction never before observed in science.