Yesterday, Boston Dynamics announced it was retiring its hydraulic Atlas robot. Atlas has long been the standard bearer of advanced humanoid robots. Over the years, the company was known as much for its research robots as it was for slick viral videos of them working out in military fatigues, forming dance mobs, and doing parkour. Fittingly, the company put together a send-off video of Atlas’s greatest hits and blunders. But there were clues this wasn’t really the end, not least of which was the specific inclusion of the word “hydraulic” and the last line of the video, “‘Til we meet again, At ..read more

Comedy clubs are my favorite weekend outings. Rally some friends, grab a few drinks, and when a joke lands for us all—there’s a magical moment when our eyes meet, and we share a cheeky grin. Smiling can turn strangers into the dearest of friends. It spurs meet-cute Hollywood plots, repairs broken relationships, and is inextricably linked to fuzzy, warm feelings of joy. At least for people. For robots, their attempts at genuine smiles often fall into the uncanny valley—close enough to resemble a human, but causing a touch of unease. Logically, you know what they’re trying to do. But gut feeling ..read more

Robotic exoskeletons could help disabled people regain their mobility, factory workers lift heavier loads, or athletes run faster. So far, they’ve been largely restricted to the lab due to the need to painstakingly calibrate them for each user, but a new universal controller could soon change that. While the word “exoskeleton” might evoke sci-fi images from movies like Alien and Avatar, the technology is edging its way towards the real world. Exoskeletons have been tested as a way to prevent injuries in car factories, let soldiers lug around heavy packs for longer, and even help people with Pa ..read more

Robots doing feats of acrobatics might be a great marketing trick, but typically these displays are highly choreographed and painstakingly programmed. Now researchers have trained a four-legged AI robot to tackle complex, previously unseen obstacle courses in real-world conditions. Creating agile robots is challenging due to the inherent complexity of the real world, the limited amount of data robots can collect about it, and the speed at which decisions need to be made to carry out dynamic movements. Companies like Boston Dynamics have regularly released videos of their robots doing everythin ..read more

Last year, Amazon announced the next step for its growing robotic workforce. A new system, dubbed Sequioa, linked robots from across a warehouse into a single automated team that the company said significantly increased the efficiency of its operations. The tech giant is now looking to fund a newer, smarter generation of robots. In an interview with The Financial Times, Amazon’s Franziska Bossart said the company’s billion-dollar industrial innovation fund will accelerate investments in startups combining AI and robotics. “Generative AI holds a lot of promise for robotics and automation,” said ..read more

In one sense, self-driving cars are a venerable technology. They’ve been tested on public roads for over a decade. But for much of that time, trials were narrow and deliberate. Only in recent years has anything resembling a commercial product materialized. Last August, in a big step forward, Waymo and GM’s Cruise began offering fully autonomous paid rides around the clock in San Francisco, one of the most challenging cities to navigate. From there, however, the paths of the two leaders in robotaxis parted. Cruise was involved in a number of increasingly severe incidents during the year, culmin ..read more

Many experts believe more general forms of artificial intelligence will be impossible without giving AI a body in the real world. A new approach that allows robots to learn how their body is configured could accelerate this process. The ability to intuitively sense the layout and positioning of our bodies, something known as proprioception, is a powerful capability. Even more impressive is our capacity to update our internal model of how all these parts are working—and how they work together—depending on both internal factors like injury or external ones like a heavy load. Replicating these ca ..read more

A robot chemist just teamed up with an AI brain to create a trove of new materials. Two collaborative studies from Google DeepMind and the University of California, Berkeley, describe a system that predicts the properties of new materials—including those potentially useful in batteries and solar cells—and produces them with a robotic arm. We take everyday materials for granted: plastic cups for a holiday feast, components in our smartphones, or synthetic fibers in jackets that keep us warm when chilly winds strike. Scientists have painstakingly discovered roughly 20,000 different types of mate ..read more

We don’t think twice about using our hands throughout the day for tasks that still thwart sophisticated robots—pouring coffee without spilling when half-awake, folding laundry without ripping delicate fabrics. The complexity of our hands is partly to thank. They are wonders of biological engineering: Hard skeleton keeps their shape and integrity and lets fingers bear weight. Soft tissues, such as muscles and ligaments, give them dexterity. Thanks to evolution, all these “biomaterials” self-assemble. Recreating them artificially is another matter. Scientists have tried to use additive manufactu ..read more

Amazon’s latest plan to use drones to deliver packages in the UK by the end of 2024 is essentially a relaunch. It was 10 years ago that the company’s founder Jeff Bezos first announced it would fly individual packages through the sky. Three years later, an impressive promotional video revealed that the project was starting out in the British city of Cambridge. But by 2021, the operation appeared to have come to an abrupt halt. Now it seems the company was undeterred by that pause. The dream of sending drones to UK homes bearing (not very heavy) items that we cannot wait more than 30 minutes to ..read more