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In popular Western culture, robots of the future are often portrayed as a threat to humans. Whether humanoid (“I, Robot,” NS-5) or Big Brother (“Terminator,” Skynet), the idea of a nonhuman, calculating device with superpowers dominating our lives and threatening our existence makes for excellent drama.

In reality, there already is a robot to be feared in the world today. But its ability to perpetrate harm is entirely driven by ...

Robotics experts at UC Santa Cruz and the University of Washington (UW) have completed a set of seven advanced robotic surgery systems for use by major medical research laboratories throughout the United States. After a round of final tests, five of the systems will be shipped to medical robotics researchers at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Nebraska, UC Berkeley, and UCLA, while the other two systems will remain at UC Santa Cruz and UW.

“We decided to follow ...

The FRAC Centre in Orléans, France will for the first time host an exhibition to be built entirely by flying robots. Titled “Flight Assembled Architecture,” the six meter-high tower will be made up of 1,500 prefabricated polystyrene foam modules. The exhibition has been developed by Swiss architect Gramazio & Kohler and Italian robot designer Raffaello D’Andrea, to inspire new methods of thinking about architecture as a “physical process of dynamic formation.”

The installation involves a fleet of quadrocopters that are programmed ...

You’ve heard it before: robots are bad at new things. They’re bad at adapting to new situations, they’re bad at recognizing new objects, and they’re bad at coming up with their own ideas about how to carry out tasks in changing environments. One way to deal with this general ineptitude is to provide a robot with endlessly detailed instructions to minimize the amount of unfamiliar things it experiences. The world is an awfully big place, however, and if we want ...

Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler, both professors at ETH’s Institute for Technology in Architecture, were among the first to use robots in architectural design. Since 2006 the duo has explored various manufacturing techniques, including both subtractive and additive fabrication, as well as a wide range of materials, to create astonishing structures entirely built by robots.

The use of robots, combined with digital design tools, means a new aesthetic becomes possible, with novel ...

We’ve recently discussed how the Microsoft Kinect can be used in robotic mobile manipulation. See above a video showing what is, to my knowledge, the first commercial integration of the Kinect with an industrial robot. Signal from standard webcams is also used. A software from Universal Robotics crunches the data to obtain a 3D representation of the scene. The application shown is the palletizing of randomly-placed boxes with Motoman robots.

Seeing consumer priced sensor entering into the ...

What high school student could resist the opportunity to use a robot to wreak havoc aboard the International Space Station? And by wreak havoc, I mean compete with other high school students to remotely control a little floating SPHERES robot under the close supervision of a real live astronaut.

The Zero Robotics competition, hosted by NASA and DARPA in cooperation with MIT, Aurora Flight Sciences, and TopCoder, tasks teams of high school ...

This demo comes from Pat Bouffard and Anil Aswani and shows (eventually) a quadrotor catching tossed ping-pong balls starting at about 1:40:

All that other malarkey at the beginning of the vid (you didn’t skip over it, did you?) talks about the programming that goes into making sure that this quadrotor, with what I think we can all agree is a fairly small container, can reliably make catches. Essentially, the robot pays special attention to what’s physically going on with itself, ...

Infants spend their first few months learning to find their way around and manipulating objects, and they are very flexible about it: Cups can come in different shapes and sizes, but they all have handles. So do pitchers, so we pick them up the same way.

Similarly, your personal robot in the future will need the ability to generalize — for example, to handle your particular set of dishes and put them in your particular dishwasher.

In Cornell’s Personal Robotics Laboratory, a ...