“Computers do things more precisely and faster than humans,” says Mary “Missy” Cummings, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. “But we need humans to deal with uncertainty. It’s this combination that interests me.” Continue reading
Category Archives: Robotics
DARPA Programmable Matter Project Yields Tiny Reconfigurable Robots at MIT
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The device doesn’t look like much: a caterpillar-sized assembly of metal rings and strips resembling something you might find buried in a home-workshop drawer. But the technology behind it, and the long-range possibilities it represents, are quite remarkable. Continue reading
Futuristic Highway Patrol Unmanned Vehicles
Highway patrol vehicles of the future will be mostly self-driving, if you accept the solutions offered by the entries in this year’s Design Challenge, an annual competition organized in conjunction with the Los Angeles auto show.
DARPA’s Pet-Proto Robot Navigates Obstacles
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In this video, the Pet-Proto, a predecessor to DARPA’s Atlas robot, is confronted with obstacles similar to those robots might face in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). Continue reading
Swarming Robots Interact with UAS
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“Spatially Targeted Communication and Self-Assembly,” by Nithin Mathews, Anders Lyhne Christensen, Rehan O’Grady, and Marco Dorigo, from Universite Libre de Bruxelles and Instituto Universitario de Lisboa, was presented at IROS 2012 in Vilamoura, Portugal. Continue reading