Robots

Although cleaning up the humungous Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a daunting concept, removing trash from local waterways is much more feasible … and that's exactly what the Clearbot robot is designed to do.

A year after Volkswagen unveiled its mobile charging robot concept designed to make the charging of electric vehicles a completely autonomous operation, the company has given us a glimpse of the robot in prototype form.

Earlier this year, we heard about a pet-entertaining/treat-dispensing robot known as Pumpkii. Although its crowdfunding campaign was cancelled, the similar Rocki is now available for purchase.

While ocean-based fish farms do help take pressure off of wild stocks, they have eco-unfriendly drawbacks of their own. A new underwater robot is being designed to address that situation, by autonomously inspecting the fish and their pens.

Researchers at Northwestern University have developed a new soft robot that can walk at roughly the speed of a human, activated by light and magnetic fields. The robot can squeeze into tight spaces and pick up, carry and release objects on demand.

Even though they don't have flexible tongues, catfish are still able to rotate captured prey within their mouths. A new understanding of how they're able to do so could ultimately lead to more dextrous underwater robots.

Scientists at Purdue University have developed a mobile docking station that enables underwater robots to stop by for a recharge and offload their data at the same time, offering a way for them to operate for far longer periods without human input.

Nothing breaks the immersion of VR like putting your hand through a wall. Haptics can give som sense of touch, but a new study has a clever alternative – robots that move physical furniture around, so there’s a real chair or wall waiting for you.

While many fighters train with a punching bag, it's not really a fair fight – after all, the bag can't punch back. Stryk's new RXT-1 training robot, however, does exactly that.

Robots are an increasingly common sight in stores, and now they’re getting a bit more hands-on. Japanese company Telexistence has begun trials in convenience stores of a robot shelf-stacker that can be controlled by a human via VR.

One day microscopic robots could be crawling through your body, clearing out disease or delivering drugs. And now we’re one step closer to that future, as scientists from Cornell University have created tiny robots powered by pulses of laser light.

Most futurists probably never saw it coming, but there are now several commercially available robots designed to entertain pets while their owners are at work. One of the latest, known as Pumpkii, features a unique modular design.