I remember when I got my first robot vacuum. It was a simple model, but it was still exciting to take it out of the box and see for ourselves that this little circular machine can indeed clean our ...

Today's robots are stuck—their bodies are usually closed systems that can neither grow nor self-repair, nor adapt to their ...

Neurotic personalities are a staple of science fiction. Researchers who study how people react to robot personalities have ...

Modular design is rapidly becoming the key to cost-effective automation, especially in sectors where demand variability and ...

Traditional robot bodies "are still monolithic, unadaptive, and unrecyclable," said paper author and mechanical engineer Hod Lipson.

Bio-inspired termite robots build complicated buildings without structure blueprint, with amazing simple rules, Harvard researchers say in Science News Home Page ...

And just a couple of weeks ago, MIT researchers demonstrated a new technique that let a robot arm learn to manipulate new objects with far less training data than is usually required. By getting the ...

Robots at the Technical University of Munich can make simple foods like sandwiches by inferring the steps required and performing them based on video data.

That means that while simple compared to much more complex autonomous agents, these origami-inspired robots can solve complex challenges, such navigating uneven surfaces or, yes, moving ...

There is one simple answer: energy. Suppose you had something like a big robot arm that you could swing to hit other robots. That might be cool and stuff, but a spinning disk could do more damage.

Controlling sensori-motor systems in higher animals or complex robots is a challenging combinatorial problem, because many sensory signals need to be simultaneously coordinated into a broad ...