When Sony’s robot dog, Aibo, was first launched in 1999, it was hailed as revolutionary and the first of its kind, promising to usher in a new industry of intelligent mobile machines for the home. But its success was far from certain. Legged robots were still in their infancy, and the idea of making an interactive walking robot for the consumer market was extraordinarily ambitious. Beyond the technical challenges, Sony also had to solve a problem that entertainment robots still struggle with: how to make Aibo compelling and engaging rather than simply novel. Sony’s team made that happen. And ..read more

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Humanoids Summit: 11–12 December 2024, MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA Enjoy today’s videos! Step into the future of factory automation with MagicBot, the cutting-edge humanoid robots from Magiclab. Recently deployed to production lines, these intelligent machines are mastering tasks like product inspections, material transport, precision assembly, barcode scanning ..read more

On the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne is home to many roboticists. It’s also home to many birds, which spend the majority of their time doing bird things. With a few exceptions, those bird things aren’t actually flying: Flying is a lot of work, and many birds have figured out that they can instead just walk around on the ground, where all the food tends to be, and not tire themselves out by having to get airborne over and over again. “Whenever I encountered crows on the EPFL campus, I would observe how they walked, hopped over or jumped on obst ..read more

Ruzena Bajcsy is one of the founders of the modern field of robotics. With an education in electrical engineering in Slovakia, followed by a Ph.D. at Stanford, Bajcsy was the first woman to join the engineering faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the first, she says, because “in those days, nice girls didn’t mess around with screwdrivers.” Bajcsy, now 91, spoke with IEEE Spectrum at the 40th anniversary celebration of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Ruzena Bajcsy Ruzena Bajcsy’s 50-plus years in robotics spanned time at ..read more

Finding it hard to get the perfect angle for your shot? PhotoBot can take the picture for you. Tell it what you want the photo to look like, and your robot photographer will present you with references to mimic. Pick your favorite, and PhotoBot—a robot arm with a camera—will adjust its position to match the reference and your picture. Chances are, you’ll like it better than your own photography. “It was a really fun project,” says Oliver Limoyo, one of the creators of PhotoBot. He enjoyed working at the intersection of several fields; human robot interaction, large language models, and class ..read more

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Humanoids Summit: 11–12 December 2024, MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA Enjoy today’s videos! Proxie represents the future of automation, combining advanced AI, mobility, and modular manipulation systems with refined situational awareness to support seamless human-robot collaboration. The first of its kind, highly adaptable, collaborative robot takes on the demandin ..read more

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Waiting for each part of a 3D-printed project to finish, taking it out of the printer, and then installing it on location can be tedious for multi-part projects. What if there was a way for your printer to print its creation exactly where you needed it? That’s the promise of MobiPrint, a new 3D printing robot that can move around a room, printing designs directly onto the floor. MobiPrint, designed by Daniel Campos Zamora at the University of Washington, consists of a modified off-the-shelf 3D printer atop a home vacuum robot. First it autonomously maps its space—be it a room, a hallway, or ..read more

AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and other applications powered by large language models (LLMs) have exploded in popularity, leading a number of companies to explore LLM-driven robots. However, a new study now reveals an automated way to hack into such machines with 100 percent success. By circumventing safety guardrails, researchers could manipulate self-driving systems into colliding with pedestrians and robot dogs into hunting for harmful places to detonate bombs. Essentially, LLMs are supercharged versions of the autocomplete feature that smartphones use to predict the rest of a word that a p ..read more

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Humanoids 2024: 22–24 November 2024, NANCY, FRANCE Enjoy today’s videos! Just when I thought quadrupeds couldn’t impress me anymore... [ Unitree Robotics ] Researchers at Meta FAIR are releasing several new research artifacts that advance robotics and support our goal of reaching advanced machine intelligence (AMI). These include Meta Sparsh, the fir ..read more