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Soft skin coverings and touch sensors have emerged as a promising feature for robots that are both safer and more intuitive for human interaction, but they are expensive and difficult to make. A recent study demonstrates that soft skin pads doubling as sensors made from thermoplastic urethane can […]

A team of computer scientists working on two different problems -- how to quickly detect damaged buildings in crisis zones and how to accurately estimate the size of bird flocks -- recently announced an AI framework that can do both. The framework, called DISCount, blends the speed and massive […]

Star Trek's Holodeck is no longer just science fiction. Using AI, engineers have created a tool that can generate 3D environments, prompted by everyday language.

A new technique can more effectively perform a safety check on an AI chatbot. Researchers enabled their model to prompt a chatbot to generate toxic responses, which are used to prevent the chatbot from giving hateful or harmful answers when deployed.

Engineers designed modular, spring-like devices to maximize the work of live muscle fibers so they can be harnessed to power biohybrid robots.

In a bid to restore privacy, researchers have created a new approach to designing cameras that process and scramble visual information before it is digitized so that it becomes obscured to the point of anonymity.

A research team has addressed the long-standing challenge of creating artificial olfactory sensors with arrays of diverse high-performance gas sensors. Their newly developed biomimetic olfactory chips (BOC) are able to integrate nanotube sensor arrays on nanoporous substrates with up to 10,000 […]

What would you do if you walked up to a robot with a human-like head and it smiled at you first? You'd likely smile back and perhaps feel the two of you were genuinely interacting. But how does a robot know how to do this? Or a better question, how does it know to get you to smile back?

Umwelt is a new a system that enables blind and low-vision users to author accessible, interactive charts representing data in three modalities: visualization, textual description, and sonification.

Engineers aim to give robots a bit of common sense when faced with situations that push them off their trained path, so they can self-correct after missteps and carry on with their chores. The team's method connects robot motion data with the common sense knowledge of large language models, or LLMs.

Artificial intelligence can spot COVID-19 in lung ultrasound images much like facial recognition software can spot a face in a crowd, new research shows. The findings boost AI-driven medical diagnostics and bring health care professionals closer to being able to quickly diagnose patients with […]

If it walks like a particle, and talks like a particle... it may still not be a particle. A topological soliton is a special type of wave or dislocation which behaves like a particle: it can move around but cannot spread out and disappear like you would expect from, say, a ripple on the surface of […]

Performing a new task based solely on verbal or written instructions, and then describing it to others so that they can reproduce it, is a cornerstone of human communication that still resists artificial intelligence (AI). A team has succeeded in modelling an artificial neural network capable of […]

Advanced killer robots are more likely to blamed for civilian deaths than military machines, new research has revealed. The study shows that high-tech bots will be held more responsible for fatalities in identical incidents.

The quadrupedal robot ANYmal went back to school and has learned a lot. Researchers used machine learning to teach it new skills: the robot can now climb over obstacles and successfully negotiate pitfalls.

Neural networks have been powering breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, including the large language models that are now being used in a wide range of applications, from finance, to human resources to healthcare. But these networks remain a black box whose inner workings engineers and […]

Researchers have developed a haptic device capable of reproducing the softness of various materials, from a marshmallow to a beating heart, overcoming a deceptively complex challenge that has previously eluded roboticists.

Researchers got a valuable assist from artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help capture and analyze data from professional hockey games faster and more accurately than ever before, with big implications for the business of sports.

A new field promises to usher in a new era of using machine learning and computer vision to tackle small and large-scale questions about the biology of organisms around the globe.

A new safety-check technique can prove with 100 percent accuracy that a planned robot motion will not result in a collision. The method can generate a proof in seconds and does so in a way that can be easily verified by a human.