A Treeswift drone on a test run in a New Jersey forest. | Credit: Treeswift Forests cover 30 percent of the Earth’s landmass, but that number is on the decline. Despite forests’ crucial role in conserving wildlife and processing carbon dioxide, many are threatened by deforestation and wildfires. Complicating these threats is the lack of […]

Source: InOrbit Thanks to the Robot Operating System, there is a community platform for robotics programming, but there has not been one for scaling of robot fleets — until now. The Robot Operations Group is a new collective of people, companies, and organizations across industries intended to help accelerate the adoption of robotics.

SemExp, or Goal-Oriented Semantic Exploration, uses machine learning to train a robot to recognize objects and understand where in a home they are likely to be found. A robot travelling from point A to point B is more efficient if it understands that point A is the living room couch and point B is a […]

Coty Cosmetics uses eight Universal Robots cobots to automate picking and packing of products. Until fairly recently, automation has been primarily been a big-company advantage. Several factors have now begun to level the playing field, including the emergence of collaborative robots, or cobots. Cobots have introduced many of the same benefits to small and medium-size […]

Polishing an artificial knee. Source: AV&R Industrial automation and healthcare robotics might not appear to have much in common at first glance, but technologies and techniques from one can benefit the other. Since its founding in 1994, AV&R Inc. has specialized in robotic surface finishing. The Saint-Bruno, Quebec-based company announced that it has applied its […]

Automation in the logistics, warehouse, and supply chain market was already growing before the COVID-19 pandemic, but accelerating e-commerce demand, social distancing requirements, and the need for greater flexibility and throughput have expanded the global market for mobile robots. Robotics developers, suppliers, and integrators need to navigate between economic hardship and commercial opportunity.

MIT researchers have developed a representation of spatial perception for robots that is modeled after the way humans perceive and navigate the world. The key component of the team’s new model is Kimera, an open-source library that the team previously developed to simultaneously construct a 3D geometric model of an environment. Kimera builds a dense […]

The prototype miniature antenna is integrated on a UGV with a software-defined radio and other robotic sensors. The system streams video between the UGV and a second node. Source: U.S. Army In addition to the intelligence for coordination, swarm robotics requires reliable communications among small robots. A new, miniature, low-frequency antenna with enhanced bandwidth is […]

Waymo’s lineup of autonomous vehicles. | Credit: Waymo 2020 was supposed to be the year of self-driving cars. That’s what General Motors, Honda, Toyota, Waymo and many others preached several years ago, anyway. But as 2020 begins to wind down, it turns out developing autonomous vehicles that are safe and reliable is much harder than […]

Eugen Elmiger, CEO of maxon Group (left) and Peter Fankhauser, CEO of ANYbotics. Source: maxon Legged robots are finding use in construction, utilities, and infrastructure inspection. Global drive specialist maxon Group and autonomous robot supplier ANYbotics AG today announced a strategic partnership they said would strengthen Switzerland as a prime location for robotics. The companies […]