The Robotics Roundup is a weekly newspost going over some of the most exciting developments in robotics over the past week.
In today’s edition we have:
- KIST offers a novel paradigm for social robots
- A tiny new climbing robot inspired by geckos and inchworms
- Teaching a Robot to Hallucinate
- Robots Can’t Fully Regain Human Trust After 3 Mistakes
- Robotics Summit & Expo full conference agenda
KIST offers a novel paradigm for social robots
When most people picture an assistive library robot, they conjure images of a mobile robotic platform roaming the halls and carrying out the duties of a human librarian. However, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology has upended that perception with this experimental design by making the entire library itself the robot.
A tiny new climbing robot inspired by geckos and inchworms
Researchers at the University of Waterloo have developed a novel soft robotics design inspired by the movement mechanisms of both inchworms and geckos. Dubbed the GeiwBot, it uses specially developed pads mimicking a gecko’s grippy feet to adhere to surfaces, while propelling itself forward like an inchworm. The untethered nature of this design may even pave the way for it’s use in upcoming surgical applications.
Teaching a Robot to Hallucinate
One of the major bottlenecks for developing more general purpose robotics platforms with machine learning is the availability of varied training data. Google’s robotics research division has found a solution to that bottleneck by utilizing generative neural networks to create training videos representing a wide variety of physical environment for the robot using only a limited amount of real world footage as a base.
Robots Can’t Fully Regain Human Trust After 3 Mistakes
It’s inevitable that robots attempting to automate complex tasks will make some amount of mistakes, especially now as the technology is still in the process of emerging. This study, published in Computers in Human Behavior shows that we may need to be extra cautious about the amount of mistakes we allow our platforms to make, as more than 3 can irreparably damage human trust in the robot.
Robotics Summit & Expo full conference agenda
The Robot Report is hosting their annual Robotics Summit and Expo May 10-11 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. As always, there will be a wide variety of panels and exhibitors showcasing the future of commercial robotics, so be sure to take a look at the official agenda to see if anything catches your interest.