Researchers at Fraunhofer IPA, in Stuttgart, Germany, have recently developed MobiKa, a low-cost, mobile robot capable of two-modal (voice and text) interactions with humans. Their robot, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, could be particularly useful for...
Robotics
Monitoring human physiological responses to improve interactions with robots
Researchers from the Century Mold Collaborative Robotics Laboratory (CMCRL) at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York have recently developed a new framework for monitoring human physiological responses while users are collaborating with a robot to...
New designs for jumping and wing-flapping microrobots
Researchers at the University of California (UC) Berkeley have recently designed two insect-scale microbots, one that jumps and another that flaps its artificial wings. These robot designs, presented in two papers pre-published on arXiv, mimic real biological...
Enhancing the vertical mobility of six-legged robot RHex using microspines
A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University has recently proposed a method to improve the vertical mobility of a renowned hexapod robot. Their approach, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, entails the addition of microspines to RHex, an existing...
Evaluating robots as teachers or partners in language learning exercises
Researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden have carried out a study exploring the effects of using physical robots to assist humans during vocabulary learning exercises. The department of Speech, Music and Hearing at KTH specializes in...
Flexoskeleton printing: Fabricating flexible exoskeletons for insect-inspired robots
Insects typically have a variety of complex exoskeleton structures, which support them in their movements and everyday activities. Fabricating artificial exoskeletons for insect-inspired robots that match the complexity of these naturally-occurring structures is a key...
From motion to emotion: The potential of robot swarms in artistic performances
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have recently carried out an interesting study exploring how motion and shape descriptors that are associated with particular emotions can be incorporated into swarm behaviors to create evocative artistic expositions....
Generating cross-modal sensory data for robotic visual-tactile perception
Perceiving an object only visually (e.g. on a screen) or only by touching it, can sometimes limit what we are able to infer about it. Human beings, however, have the innate ability to integrate visual and tactile stimuli, leveraging whatever sensory data is available...
Implementing kick control on simulated and real-world wheeled robots
A team of researchers at Babes-Bolyai University, in Romania, and Goethe University Frankfurt have recently collaborated on a study exploring implementations of kick control on both simulated and real-world wheeled robots. The term 'kick control' refers to short,...
Inflatable space robots with integrated dielectric elastomer transducers (DETs)
Researchers at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute and Technische Universität Dresden have recently designed a new type of inflatable robot for space navigation. These robots, presented in a paper published in SPIE Digital Library, were created using dielectric...