Robotics

A new report documents the interplay of powerful forces that drove AI over the past year: open versus proprietary technology, public versus private financing, innovation versus caution. 

A robot that plays table tennis beats human beginners and entertains experts.

Amazon took on talent and technology from robotics startup Covariant to enhance its warehouse automation, an area critical to its core ecommerce business.

Brain-to-computer interfaces that enable users to control robots with their thoughts typically execute a single type of task such as reaching and grasping. Researchers designed a system that responds to a variety of intentions.

Humanoid robots can play football (known as soccer in the United States) in the real world, thanks to reinforcement learning.

Robots equipped with large language models are asking their human overseers for help.

A robot outperformed human chemists at synthesizing chemicals. Researchers at University of Amsterdam built RoboChem, an integrated robotic system that learned to design light-activated chemical reactions while achieving optimal yields and throughput.

A pretrained large language model has helped a robot resolve high-level commands into sequences of subtasks. It can do this more precisely with additional training — both on language-vision tasks and robotics tasks. 

The latest robot dog is smarter — and less expensive — than ever. Unitree Robotics of Hangzhou, China, unleashed Go2, a quadruped robot that trots alongside its owner, stands on two legs, jumps, talks, takes photos, and retails for less than a high-end MacBook.

Training an agent that controls a robot arm to perform a task — say, opening a door — that involves a sequence of motions (reach, grasp, turn, pull, release) can take from tens of thousands to millions of examples...

Neural networks are predicting how metal will deform under pressure to pilot robots through the tricky process of fabricating aircraft. Machina Labs crafts metal using AI-guided robotic arms.

Adults in the United States tend to view AI’s medical applications favorably but are leery of text and image generation. Pew Research Center polled 11,004 U.S. adults for their opinions of AI in science, healthcare, and media.

Roboticists often train their machines in simulation, where the controller model can learn from millions of hours of experience. A new method trained robots in the real world in 20 minutes.

Autonomous robots trained to navigate in a simulation often struggle in the real world. New work helps bridge the gap in a counterintuitive way.

Individual deep learning models proved their mettle in hundreds of tasks. The scope of multi-task models expanded dramatically in the past year.