Recent technological advances have enabled the development of increasingly sophisticated electronics. Some of these new tools, particularly wearable devices and soft robots, require or can greatly benefit from flexible electronic components, including sensors,...
A growing number of companies and research groups worldwide are now developing compliant sensors based on composite materials, which can have a wide range of possible applications. Composite materials, those made of two or more substances, often have unique and...
Over the past decade or so, researchers worldwide have developed increasingly advanced techniques to enable robot navigation in a variety of environments, including on land, in the air, underwater or on particularly rough terrains. To be effective, these techniques...
In years to come, robots could assist human users in a variety of ways, both when they are inside their homes and in other settings. To be more intuitive, robots should be able to follow natural language commands and instructions, as this allows users to communicate...
Humans are generally able to adapt their walking style based on the environment they are moving in, for instance, speeding up if the consistency of the ground below their feet allows it, slowing down when the floor is slippery, changing direction to avoid puddles or...
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Laboratory have recently designed Modboat, a robotic boat that could be used to monitor oceans or carry out marine operations. This low-cost aquatic robot, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, can swim in...
Microscopic sensors that can detect small changes in pressure have numerous useful applications, particularly for the development of robots and health-monitoring wearable devices. Most existing capacitive and transistor-based pressure sensors, however, have a number...
Self-reconfigurable robots (SRRs) that can automatically change shape and adapt to their surrounding environment have recently attracted a lot of interest within the robotics research community. These robots could have several useful applications, as they can acquire...
In recent years, researchers worldwide have been trying to develop computational techniques that reproduce behaviors of humans or animals in robots and machines. This includes, for instance, the structure and functioning of the human brain, the swarm communication...
A new species of machines might bring substantial change in the field of robotics, with research ongoing in to the potential role for the most essential organisms on the planet: plants.