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Engineers have designed robots that crawl, swim, fly and even slither like a snake, but no robot can hold a candle to a squirrel, which can parkour through a thicket of branches, leap across perilous gaps and execute pinpoint landings on the flimsiest of branches. University of California, Berkeley, biologists and engineers are trying to remedy that situation. Based on studies of the biomechanics of squirrel leaps and landings, they have designed a hopping robot

An AI-powered robot that can prepare cups of coffee in a busy kitchen could usher in the next generation of intelligent machines, a study suggests. Using a combination of cutting-edge AI, sensitive sensors and fine-tuned motor skills, the robot can interact with its surroundings in more human-like ways than ever before, researchers say. The new technology, developed by a team at the University of Edinburgh, could transform robots’ ability to carry out tasks that previously

Florida State University chemists have created a machine learning tool that can identify the chemical composition of dried salt solutions from an image with 99% accuracy. By using robotics to prepare thousands of samples and artificial intelligence to analyze their data, they created a simple, inexpensive tool that could expand possibilities for performing chemical analysis. The work was published in Digital Discovery. “We are living in the age of artificial intelligence and big data,” said

Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine have developed a powerful AI tool, built on the same transformer architecture used by large language models like ChatGPT, to process an entire night’s sleep. To date, it is one of the largest studies, analyzing 1,011,192 hours of sleep. Details on their findings were reported in the March 13online issue of the journal Sleep. The model, called patch foundational transformer for sleep (PFTSleep), analyzes brain waves, muscle activity,

We move thanks to coordination among many skeletal muscle fibers, all twitching and pulling in sync. While some muscles align in one direction, others form intricate patterns, helping parts of the body move in multiple ways. In recent years, scientists and engineers have looked to muscles as potential actuators for “biohybrid” robots — machines powered by soft, artificially grown muscle fibers. Such bio-bots could squirm and wiggle through spaces where traditional machines cannot. For the

A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Stuttgart developed a biohybrid micro swimmer covered with magnetic material, whose swimming ability is largely unaffected by the coating. The team from the Physical Intelligence Department at MPI-IS published their work in the journal Matter, which covers a wide range of materials science research. In nature, the ten-micron small, single-cell microalgae are fantastic swimmers, propelled by their two whip-like flagella at

Empa researchers are working on artificial muscles that can keep up with the real thing. They have now developed a method of producing the soft and elastic, yet powerful structures using 3D printing. One day, these could be used in medicine or robotics — and anywhere else where things need to move at the touch of a button. Artificial muscles don’t just get robots moving: One day, they could support people at work or when

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Cologne have developed an AI-based learning system that recognizes strengths and weaknesses in mathematics by tracking eye movements with a webcam to generate problem-solving hints. This enables teachers to provide significantly more children with individualized support. An up-to-date PC, a good graphics card and a standard webcam: according to research by Prof. Achim Lilienthal, that’s all you need to identify pupils’ strengths and

Researchers at UC San Francisco have enabled a man who is paralyzed to control a robotic arm through a device that relays signals from his brain to a computer. He was able to grasp, move and drop objects just by imagining himself performing the actions. The device, known as a brain-computer interface (BCI), worked for a record 7 months without needing to be adjusted. Until now, such devices have only worked for a day or

Walking into your favorite restaurant and seeing a robot chef in the kitchen may seem far-fetched, but a University of Mississippi professor’s research says bots could be a solution to persistent labor shortages in the industry. Jeffrey Pittman II, instructional assistant professor in nutrition and hospitality management, is researching the potential benefits — and numerous doubts — that surround robots invading the kitchen. “We have to look at this from the standpoint of, ‘What benefits