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Researchers at ETH Zurich are utilising artificial intelligence to analyse the behaviour of laboratory mice more efficiently and reduce the number of animals in experiments. There is one specific task that stress researchers who conduct animal experiments need to be particularly skilled at. This also applies to researchers who want to improve the conditions in which laboratory animals are kept. They need to be able to assess the wellbeing of their animals based on behavioural

Mobile phones could be the key to a cheaper and more reliable way of tracking animals for ecology and conservation research, according to a new study from The Australian National University (ANU). Traditional animal tracking methods are often expensive and require the tagged animals to be close to the tracking technology. Now, ANU researchers have developed a cheap, lightweight Bluetooth beacon that can provide regular updates through our network of mobile phones in areas used

Researchers in China have developed a robot that identifies different plant species at various stages of growth by “touching” their leaves with an electrode. The robot can measure properties such as surface texture and water content that cannot be determined using existing visual approaches, according to the study, published November 13 in the journal Device. The robot identified ten different plant species with an average accuracy of 97.7% and identified leaves of the flowering bauhinia

In the race to develop robust perception systems for robots, one persistent challenge has been operating in bad weather and harsh conditions. For example, traditional, light-based vision sensors such as cameras or LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) fail in heavy smoke and fog. However, nature has shown that vision doesn’t have to be constrained by light’s limitations — many organisms have evolved ways to perceive their environment without relying on light. Bats navigate using the

A team of clinicians, scientists, and engineers at Mount Sinai trained a deep learning pose-recognition algorithm on video feeds of infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) to accurately track their movements and identify key neurologic metrics. Findings from this new artificial intelligence (AI)-based tool, published November 11 in Lancet’s eClinicalMedicine, could lead to a minimally invasive, scalable method for continuous neurologic monitoring in NICUs, providing critical real-time insights into infant health that have

Mechanical engineering PhD candidate Arman Tekinalp, fellow graduate student Seung Hyun Kim, Professor Prashant Mehta, and Associate Professor Mattia Gazzola, all from the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). Their interdisciplinary collaboration also included Assistant Professor Noel Naughton (formerly a Beckman fellow) from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech alongside researchers from the Department of Molecular

A robot, trained for the first time by watching videos of seasoned surgeons, executed the same surgical procedures as skillfully as the human doctors. The successful use of imitation learning to train surgical robots eliminates the need to program robots with each individual move required during a medical procedure and brings the field of robotic surgery closer to true autonomy, where robots could perform complex surgeries without human help. “It’s really magical to have this

The patient arrived with a bladder stone, grimacing in pain and moping about. He wouldn’t even chew his cud. The patient, you see, was a goat. And while treated for his bladder stone — a common ailment in the small ruminants — he was also contributing to new research that aims to accurately measure pain not only in goats, but other domestic animals as well and even, one day, in people. “If we solve the

Robots are supposed to do boring or unpleasant jobs for us. However, tedious tasks such as cleaning the bathroom are challenging to automate. How is it possible to calculate the movement of a robot arm so that it can reach every part of a washbasin? What if the basin has unusually curved edges? How much force should be applied at which point? It would be highly time-consuming to precisely encode all these things in fixed

Robot-assisted heart surgery usually requires an assistant at the operating table to help the surgeon insert the robot arm through a small incision. The assistant has to constantly make sure the surgeon has enough room to operate via the robot arm. For greater independence on the surgeon’s side, an Osaka Metropolitan University-led group has developed a device that can secure the surgical field. Graduate School of Medicine Professor Toshihiko Shibata and Associate Professor Yosuke Takahashi