Robotics

What could possibly be better than the Christmas fireworks display at Disney World Florida, you might be asking yourself? Disney and Intel have partnered together to create a new type of light show where 300 colourful lights will fly simultaneously to the sound of holiday harmonies. The drone performance is called ‘Starbright Holidays’.

The online testing and assessment system tool, MapleSim, from Maplesoft is being employed at The University of Manchester where Dr. Joaquin Carrasco, Professor of Control Systems at the University’s School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, has taught various control systems courses to Master’s students for the past six years.

The quest to develop a wireless micro-robot for biomedical applications requires a small-scale "motor" that can be wirelessly powered through biological media. While magnetic fields can be used to power small robots wirelessly, they do not provide selectivity since all actuators (the components controlling motion) under the same magnetic field just follow the same motion.

At Google's DeepMind, a team has made AI inroads in speed and performance. The researchers behind the effort have put out a paper describing the maneuvers and the paper is on arXiv, titled "Reinforcement learning with unsupervised auxiliary tasks." Authors are Max Jaderberg, Volodymyr Mnih, Wojciech Marian Czarnecki, Tom Schaul, Joel Leibo, David Silver and Koray Kavukcuoglu, of DeepMind, London.

Tom White, senior lecturer in Victoria's School of Design, has created Smilevector—a bot that examines images of people, then adds or removes smiles to their faces. "It has examined hundreds of thousands of faces to learn the difference between images, by finding relations and reapplying them," says Mr White. "When the computer finds an image it looks to identify if the person is smiling or not. If there isn't a smile, it adds one...

On the wall of Aaron Dollar's office is a poster for R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), the 1920 Czech play that gave us the word "robot." The story ends with the nominal robots seizing control of the factory of their origin and then wiping out nearly all of humanity. Dollar, fortunately, has something more cheerful in mind for the future of human-robot relations. He sees them as helpers in our daily lives—performing tasks like settin...

  Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a combination of software and hardware that will allow them to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and insect cyborgs, or biobots, to map large, unfamiliar areas – such as collapsed buildings after a disaster.

Precision gearing specialist Harmonic Drive UK has released a one-page guide giving advice for those interested in a career in robotics. The guide details the different routes that people can take to work in the sector, routes that depart from traditional robot manufacturing. Despite the engineering skills shortage, there are still many jobs available in various areas of the robotics industry.

A range of robotic activities and challenges, that are open to schools, industry sectors and academic institutions, also known as UK Robotics Week 2017 has officially been launched. These activities culminate in a national week of celebration being held 24th – 30th June 2017. 

A range of robotics activities and challenges have opened to schools, academic institutions and industry sectors with the launch of UK Robotics Week 2017. These activities culminate in a national week of celebration being held 24th to 30th June 2017. The second annual UK Robotics Week is set to be even bigger and better, building on the success of the inaugural event.