MIT creates a soft-fingered robotic gripper than could eventually tie knots...
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has shared the results of a new project in which it built a two-fingered robotic gripper, which has soft pads for dedicated and fine...
View ArticleWith $5 million in hand, The Routing Company is giving public transit...
James Cox spent much of his professional career at Uber trying to crack the problem of how to reduce congestion through ridesharing. As one of the architects of the Uber Pool service and a longtime...
View ArticleMIT is building a ‘one-stop shop’ for 3D-printing robots
Additive manufacturing has proven an ideal solution for certain tasks, but the technology still lacks more traditional methods in a number of categories. One of the biggest is the requirement for...
View ArticleCables could help soft robots transform into harder structures
The sub-category of soft robotics has transformed the way many think about the field. Oft-influenced by natural phenomenon, the technology offers a dramatically different approach than the sort of...
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Programming robots to put jackets on people is harder than it looks
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from some of our favorite YouTube shitty robots, it’s that human-robot interaction can be a tricky business. Developing methods to get rigid robotic arms to perform...
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The road to a cheaper prosthetic hand
Alt-Bionics made waves back in late 2019 when the brand new startup competed at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Tech Symposium. The company finished second to 3BM’s infrared paint-curing...
View ArticleInkbit raises $30M for its self-correcting 3D printing technology
MIT CSAIL spinout Inkbit this week announced that it has raised $30 million. The Series B, led by Phoenix Venture Partners LLC, brings the firm’s total funding up to $45 million. PVP joins existing...
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MIT’s CSAIL self-driving water taxis launched in the Amsterdam canals
Granted, there aren’t many cities where self-driving water taxis are a viable option, but Amsterdam may just be one of those places. This week, scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial...
View ArticleTeaching robots to socialize
Politeness doesn’t really amount to much when you’re programmed to get from point A to point B. But if robots are going to play an increased role in human society, questions arise around how precisely...
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Home, star, trucker
Once I was recovered from the initial surrealism of Amazon launching its own home robot, I immediately thought about iRobot. The company cornered the home robotics market a decade ago, and while there...
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New Year’s robolutions
This is always a strange week — that liminal space between the Christmas holiday and New Year. Romjul — or “Dead Week” — as they call it in Norway (thanks Haje). It’s a time for quiet and reflection on...
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To Servi man
A nice secondary effect of writing this newsletter is getting an influx of responses when I write on a specific topic. Last week it was agtech. I expressed a bit of disappointment in the category. So...
View ArticleBetter learning through ‘complex dough-manipulation’
A disproportionate number of the early industrial food-making robots we’ve seen have been focused on pizza. I’ve long posited that this is for two key reasons. First: People like pizza. We eat a lot of...
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MIT used autonomous knitting to create these soft robotic banana fingers
The MIT CSAIL team calls them “banana fingers,” and I can’t really disagree. They’re oblong and bright yellow, but as visually arresting as they are at first glance, they do serve a function. The glove...
View ArticleAre universities doing enough to foster robotics startups?
A few years ago, I got in the habit of asking researchers the titular question: Are universities doing enough to foster robotics startups? To a one, the answer was invariably, “no.” It was a massive...
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Now AI can outmaneuver you at both Stratego and Diplomacy
While artificial intelligence long ago surpassed human capability in chess, and more recently Go — and let us not forget Doom — other more complex board games still present a challenge to computer...
View Article‘Pan-variant’ COVID vaccine could defang future strains thanks to machine...
A new approach to vaccines with a machine learning twist could put an end to boosters and seasonal variant shots, according to MIT researchers. This “pan-variant” vaccine would ignore the virus itself...
View ArticleThis robot dog can play soccer on grass, mud and sand
Here’s a fun challenge: teaching a quadrupedal robot to successfully dribble a soccer ball. It is, in essence, a core component of RoboCup, the big international competition founded all the way back in...
View ArticleMIT develops a motion and task planning system for home robots
Why aren’t there more robots in homes? This a surprising complex question — and our homes are surprisingly complex places. A big part of the reason autonomous systems are thriving on warehouse and...
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What is a liquid neural network, really?
The initial research papers date back to 2018, but for most, the notion of liquid networks (or liquid neural networks) is a new one. It was “Liquid Time-constant Networks,” published at the tail end of...
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