There are some things a robot can't do, but catching a flying object is no longer one of them. With its four-fingered, three-jointed hand, a new robot can catch a ball, a bottle or a tennis racket ...

Robots could one day be able to 'see' well enough to be in people's homes and offices. Humans have long been masters of dexterity, a skill that can largely be credited to the help of our eyes. Robots, ...

Folks blessed with a soft touch seem to have no problem getting to grips with delicate objects, but it can be a tough ask for robots. Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering ...

The ability to create tools from everyday objects requires creativity, abstract thinking, and problem-solving. As such, that complex ability has been used emblematically to differentiate so-called ...

ATLANTA (March 19, 2008) — Robots are fluent in their native language of 1 and 0 absolutes but struggle to grasp the nuances and imprecise nature of human language. While scientists are making slow, ...

To estimate the weight of a rock, you pick it up. Is it rough, or smooth? You run a finger over it. We're constantly gathering information through our sense of touch, which is closely connected to how ...

Stacking an object on top of another object is a straightforward task for most people. But even the most complex robots struggle to handle more than one such task at a time. Stacking requires a range ...

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have had a breakthrough in giving a robot the human-like ability to determine what an object looks like just by ...

The research focuses on expanding the use of insect-scale robots measured in mere millimeters, the tiny size of which lends itself to applications in the human body. Back in 2018, we looked at an ...

RF Grasp is a picking robot that combines vision with radio frequency (RF) sensing to find and grasps objects, even if they're hidden from view. The technology could aid fulfillment in e-commerce ...