A break in play during a Small Size League match. Today, 21 July, saw the competitions draw to a close in a thrilling finale. In the third and final of our round-up articles, we provide a flavour of the action from this last day. If you missed them, you can find our first two digests ..read more

The Standard Platform Soccer League in action. This is the second of our daily digests from RoboCup2024 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. If you missed the first digest, which gives some background to RoboCup, you can find it here. Competitions continued across all the leagues today, with participants vying for a place in Sunday’s finals. The ..read more

The main soccer arena. RoboCup is an international scientific initiative with the goal to advance the state of the art of intelligent robots. As part of this initiative, a series of competitions and events are held throughout the year. The main showcase event is an international affair with teams travelling from far and wide to ..read more

Robotics is helping to rehabilitate and increase human abilities in areas like mobility and stamina. Innovations in robotic devices, exoskeletons, and wearable tech aim to offer disabled people different perspectives and new experiences, as well as supporting humans more widely to access, inhabit and work safely in dangerous and extreme conditions. What does the future hold for these technologies and the people they will become a part of? In this special live recording at the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of the Great Exhibition Road Festival, Claire chatted to Milia Helena Hasbani (Impe ..read more

Claire chatted to Simone Schuerle from ETH Zürich all about microrobots, medicine and science. Simone Schuerle is Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, where she heads the Responsive Biomedical System Lab. With her team, she develops diagnostic and therapeutic systems at the nano- and microscale with the aim of tackling a range of challenging problems in medicine. One major focus of her current research is addressing limitations in drug delivery through scalable magnetically enhanced drug transport. In 2014, she co-founded the spin-off MagnebotiX that offers electromagnetic contr ..read more

Claire chatted to Lord Ara Darzi from Imperial College London all about robotic surgery – past, present and future. Ara Darzi is Co-Director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London and holds the Paul Hamlyn Chair of Surgery. In 2002, he was knighted for his services to medicine and surgery and in 2007 was introduced as Lord Darzi of Denham to the UK’s House of Lords as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health. Professor Darzi leads a large multidisciplinary academic and policy research team, focused on convergence science across engineering, physi ..read more

Claire chatted to Isabelle Ormerod from the University of Bristol all about human-centred design and women in robotics. Isabelle Ormerod is a PhD student at Bristol Robotics Lab in the Design and Manufacturing Futures Lab. Her professional path began in the medical product design industry, where she observed firsthand the application of human factors (HF) processes for dextrous and high-risk procedures. This experience sparked her interest in leveraging data-driven HF approaches in product design. Isabelle is also part of the Leadership team of Women in Robotics UK. This organization is comm ..read more

Claire chatted to Mario Di Castro from CERN all about robotic inspection and maintenance in hazardous environments. Mario Di Castro has a Master’s degree in electronic engineering from the University of Naples Federico II in Italy and a PhD in robotics and industrial controls from the Polytechnic University of Madrid in Spain. Since 2011 he has led the Mechatronics, Robotics and Operation section at CERN. The section is responsible for the design, construction, installation, operation and maintenance of robotic systems used for remote maintenance at the CERN accelerator complex. His research ..read more

Claire chatted to Margarita Chli from the University of Cyprus all about vision, navigation, and small aerial drones. Margarita Chli is a professor of Robotic Vision and the director of the Vision for Robotics Lab, at the University of Cyprus and ETH Zurich. Her work has contributed to the first vision-based autonomous flight of a small drone and the first demonstration of collaborative monocular SLAM for a small swarm of drones. Margarita has given invited keynotes at the World Economic Forum in Davos, TEDx, and ICRA, and she was featured in Robohub’s 2016 list of “25 women in Robotics you ..read more

Suction cup grasping a stone – Image credit: Tianqi Yue The team, based at Bristol Robotics Laboratory, studied the structures of octopus biological suckers,  which have superb adaptive suction abilities enabling them to anchor to rock. In their findings, published in the journal PNAS today, the researchers show how they were able create a multi-layer soft structure and an artificial fluidic system to mimic the musculature and mucus structures of biological suckers. Suction is a highly evolved biological adhesion strategy for soft-body organisms to achieve strong grasping on various ..read more