Robotics Research News

May 9, 2025

Top Headlines

Ping Pong Bot Returns Shots With High-Speed Precision

May 8, 2025 — Engineers developed a ping-pong-playing robot that quickly estimates the speed and trajectory of an incoming ball and precisely hits it to a desired location on the ...

Eco-Friendly Aquatic Robot Is Made from Fish Food

May 8, 2025 — An edible robot leverages a combination of biodegradable fuel and surface tension to zip around the water's surface, creating a safe -- and nutritious -- alternative to environmental monitoring devices made from artificial polymers and ...

Robotic Dog Mimics Mammals for Superior Mobility on Land and in Water

May 8, 2025 — A team of researchers has unveiled a cutting-edge Amphibious Robotic Dog capable of roving across both land and water with remarkable ...

Transforming Hospital Sanitation: Autonomous Robots for Wiping and UV-C Disinfection

May 7, 2025 — A research team develops disinfection robot combining physical wiping and UV-C ...

Latest Headlines

updated 10:47pm EDT

Gender Characteristics of Service Robots Can Influence Customer Decisions

May 6, 2025 — While service robots with male characteristics can be more persuasive when interacting with some women who have a low sense of decision-making power, 'cute' design features -- such as big eyes and ...

Do Manta Rays Benefit from Collective Motion?

May 6, 2025 — Researchers model the motions of groups of manta rays to study how group dynamics affect their propulsion, studying different formations of three manta rays: in tandem, in a triangular setup with one ...

Robotic Touch Sensors Are Not Just Skin Deep

May 5, 2025 — Researchers argue that the problem that has been lurking in the margins of many papers about touch sensors lies in the robotic skin ...

Text-to-Video AI Blossoms With New Metamorphic Video Capabilities

May 5, 2025 — Computer scientists have developed a new AI text-to-video model that learns real-world physics knowledge from time-lapse ...

Privacy-Aware Building Automation

May 5, 2025 — Researchers developed a framework to enable decentralized artificial intelligence-based building automation with a focus on privacy. The system enables AI-powered devices like cameras and interfaces ...

Using Principles of Swarm Intelligence, Study Compared Platforms That Allow Brainstorming Among Large Groups

May 1, 2025 — A next-generation technology developed in 2023, conversational swarm intelligence (CSI), combines the principles of ASI with the power of large ...

Researchers Develop a Novel Vote-Based Model for More Accurate Hand-Held Object Pose Estimation

May 1, 2025 — Estimating the pose of hand-held objects is a critical and challenging problem in robotics and computer vision. While leveraging multi-modal RGB and ...

Artificial Sense of Touch, Improved

May 1, 2025 — While exploring a digitally represented object through artificially created sense of touch, brain-computer interface users described the warm fur of a purring cat, the smooth rigid surface of a door ...

High-Wire Act: Soft Robot Can Carry Cargo Up and Down Steep Aerial Wires

Apr. 28, 2025 — Researchers have created a light-powered soft robot that can carry loads through the air along established tracks, similar to cable cars or aerial trams. The soft robot operates autonomously, can ...

Flying Robots Unlock New Horizons in Construction

Apr. 24, 2025 — An international team has explored how in future aerial robots could process construction materials precisely in the air -- an approach with great potential for difficult-to-access locations or work ...

Combining Signals Could Make for Better Control of Prosthetics

Apr. 24, 2025 — Combining two different kinds of signals could help engineers build prosthetic limbs that better reproduce natural movements, according to a new study. A combination of electromyography and force ...

Engineering a Robot That Can Jump 10 Feet High -- Without Legs

Apr. 23, 2025 — Inspired by the movements of a tiny parasitic worm, engineers have created a 5-inch soft robot that can jump as high as a basketball hoop. Their device, a silicone rod with a carbon-fiber spine, can ...

'Periodic Table of Machine Learning' Could Fuel AI Discovery

Apr. 23, 2025 — After uncovering a unifying algorithm that links more than 20 common machine-learning approaches, researchers organized them into a 'periodic table of machine learning' that can help ...

Material? Robot? It's a Metabot

Apr. 23, 2025 — The invention is a metamaterial, which is a material engineered to feature new and unusual properties that depend on the material's physical structure rather than its chemical composition. In ...

Robot See, Robot Do: System Learns After Watching How-to Videos

Apr. 22, 2025 — Researchers have developed a new robotic framework powered by artificial intelligence -- called RHyME (Retrieval for Hybrid Imitation under Mismatched Execution) -- that allows robots to learn tasks ...

RoboBee Comes in for a Landing

Apr. 16, 2025 — A recently created RoboBee is now outfitted with its most reliable landing gear to date, inspired by one of nature's most graceful landers: the crane fly. The team has given their flying robot a ...

Farm Robot Autonomously Navigates, Harvests Among Raised Beds

Apr. 16, 2025 — A researcher has developed an autonomous driving algorithm for agricultural robots used for greenhouse cultivation and other farm ...

Bite-Sized Chunks of Chicken With the Texture of Whole Meat Can Be Grown in the Lab

Apr. 16, 2025 — A bioreactor that mimics a circulatory system can deliver nutrients and oxygen to artificial tissue, enabling the production of over 10 grams of chicken muscle for cultured meat ...

Explainable AI for Ship Navigation Raises Trust, Decreases Human Error

Apr. 15, 2025 — A team has developed an explainable AI model for automatic collision avoidance between ...

Machine Learning Unlocks Superior Performance in Light-Driven Organic Crystals

Apr. 15, 2025 — Researchers have developed a machine learning workflow to optimize the output force of photo-actuated organic crystals. Using LASSO regression to identify key molecular substructures and Bayesian ...

Photonic Computing Needs More Nonlinearity: Acoustics Can Help

Apr. 14, 2025 — Neural networks are one typical structure on which artificial intelligence can be based. The term neural describes their learning ability, which to some extent mimics the functioning of neurons in ...

A New Robotic Gripper Made of Measuring Tape Is Sizing Up Fruit and Veggie Picking

Apr. 9, 2025 — It's a game a lot of us played as children -- and maybe even later in life: unspooling measuring tape to see how far it would extend before bending. But to engineer, this game was an ...

Hopping Gives This Tiny Robot a Leg Up

Apr. 9, 2025 — A hopping, insect-sized robot can jump over gaps or obstacles, traverse rough, slippery, or slanted surfaces, and perform aerial acrobatic maneuvers, while using a fraction of the energy required for ...

3D-Printed Open-Source Robot Offers Accessible Solution for Materials Synthesis

Apr. 9, 2025 — FLUID, an open-source, 3D-printed robot, offers an affordable and customizable solution for automated material synthesis, making advanced research accessible to more ...

Tiny, Soft Robot Flexes Its Potential as a Life Saver

Apr. 8, 2025 — A tiny, soft, flexible robot that can crawl through earthquake rubble to find trapped victims or travel inside the human body to deliver medicine may seem like science fiction, but an international ...

How Can Science Benefit from AI? Risks?

Apr. 4, 2025 — Researchers from chemistry, biology, and medicine are increasingly turning to AI models to develop new hypotheses. However, it is often unclear on which basis the algorithms come to their conclusions ...

Nurture More Important Than Nature for Robotic Hand

Apr. 3, 2025 — How does a robotic arm or a prosthetic hand learn a complex task like grasping and rotating a ball? Researchers address the classic 'nature versus nurture' question. The research ...

Scientists Unveil Starfish-Inspired Wearable Tech for Heart Monitoring

Apr. 2, 2025 — When we move, it's harder for existing wearable devices to accurately track our heart activity. But researchers found that a starfish's five-arm shape helps solve this problem. Inspired by ...

My Robot Therapist: The Ethics of AI Mental Health Chatbots for Kids

Mar. 31, 2025 — AI mental health apps may offer a cheap and accessible way to fill the gaps in the overstretched U.S. mental health care system, but ethics experts warn that we need to be thoughtful about how we use ...

Artificial Neurons Organize Themselves

Mar. 28, 2025 — Novel artificial neurons learn independently and are more strongly modeled on their biological counterparts. A team of researchers has programmed these infomorphic neurons and constructed artificial ...