Artificial skin that can sense potentially harmful forces could help robots detect danger, in a similar way to how pain helps people avoid hazards.

In humans, painful sensations come from a complex interplay between peripheral nerve signals and the brain’s interpretation of them. Electrical spikes sent by pain sensors in the skin, called nociceptors, are relayed through nerves to several parts of the brain, which can lead to self-preserving actions, such as moving a hand away from a sharp knife.

Jie Tan at Hunan University…

Robots could negotiate awkward terrain surefootedly thanks to squidgy paws containing cameras.

Tejal Barnwal at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Jørgen Anker Olsen at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and their colleagues have developed what they call a Terrain Recognition and Contact Force Estimation Paw (TRACEPaw).

The bottom part of the foot is half a silicone ball, which deforms as the robot walks. Inside the ball, a camera takes…

Inflatable squishy tubes could be used to build soft robots that move when air is pushed through them.

Robotic hands made from metal frequently end up crushing delicate objects like fruit when trying to pick them up, so researchers often experiment with making them out of gentler materials. Pierre-Thomas Brun at Princeton University and his colleagues have found that soft, inflatable tubes may just do the trick.

The team filled various moulds with a rubber-like material called polyvinyl siloxane that starts off liquid but becomes solid and elastic as time passes. While the material was still fluid, the researchers pushed…

A swarm of small, wiggling robots that communicate by flashing lights at each other can make collective decisions. This is similar to the process bees use to reach consensus on where to build their nest.

“We believe that in the near future there are going to be simple robots that will do jobs that we don’t want to do, and it will be very important that they make decisions in a decentralised, autonomous manner,” says Carmen Miguel at the University of …

People tend to cut corners and allow trusted colleagues to pick up the slack when working as a team, in a phenomenon known as social loafing. Now researchers have found that the same thing happens when humans work with robots.

Dietlind Helene Cymek at the Technical University of Berlin in Germany and her colleagues designed an experiment to test whether humans would put in less effort when they think that their personal contribution to a task won’t be noticed. …

A 110-year-old patent has inspired a new robotic hand that can securely grip objects of any shape without the need for complex motorised joints.

The inspiration for the device dates back to 1913, when a now-expired US patent was granted on an invention for “obtaining intimate contact with, engaging, or clamping bodies of any shape”. The original design consists of a nested arrangement of pivoting semi-circles in diminishing sizes, each of which could individually rotate to form a contour that securely grasps any shape.

Joel Burdick at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena happened to see a …

Remotely operated one-armed boxing robots, inspired by the 2011 movie Real Steel, can respond to a person’s movements in as little as one hundredth of a second.

“Taking inspiration from the film and incentivised by the entertainment value, we decided to see if we can realise the concept of real life fighting robots,” says Yining Geng at the Qibo Robot Company in Weihai, China, which created the robots, dubbed QIBBOTs.

Turning the movie’s premise into reality required robots that can operate faster than anything previously seen. Remotely operated robots are already used for applications including surgery and seabed exploration, but all have a time-lag or latency, typically 100 milliseconds. This doesn’t interfere with the careful, deliberate movements of surgery or remote sample collection, but it does impair the experience of a fast-moving fighting game.

Humans are sensitive to a latency of as little as 10 to 20 milliseconds, which set the requirement for QIBBOT. The team hit this goal with two innovations. One was improving the physical speed of the robot by optimising the mechanical structure of its arm. The other was using software to anticipate the operator’s commands and counteract latency.

Geng says these tweaks make QIBBOT the world’s fastest remotely operated robot with a latency of just 12 milliseconds. One limitation is that the setup is based on a virtual reality rig that tracks the operator’s movements. This is easy and natural to use, but adds 4 milliseconds of latency that the team cannot change.

The team is already working on a follow-up robot with two arms, with more joints in each arm and which moves more smoothly. The initial application will be the robot fighting game, but their low latency design may also find commercial and industrial uses in situations where quick reactions are needed.

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Robots could use living invertebrates as grippers to help them pick up awkward objects or grasp things underwater.

“We don’t mean it as a replacement for robotics, but as a kind of new direction or new way to do both biology and robotics,” says Josephine Galipon at Tohoku University in Japan.

But others have questioned how useful or ethical this approach is.

Researchers have previously experimented with using live insects to control entire robots or even using whole dead spiders as robotic grippers.

Galipon and her colleagues have now made grippers using pill bugs – a kind of woodlouse – and chitons – marine molluscs that can stick firmly to rocks, like a limpet.

The team made custom 3D-printed housings for both organisms and attached them to a robot arm. The pill bugs picked up and rotated a piece of cotton wool for around 2 minutes before releasing it. The chitons picked up cork, wood and plastic cylinders underwater, but didn’t easily release the objects.

While the release mechanisms will need to be developed further, the chiton’s ability to pick up cork and wood is promising, as it is a difficult task for the suction cups that are conventionally used in underwater robotic grippers, says Galipon.

It is a novel approach, says Steve Davis at the University of Birmingham, UK, but it is unclear what tasks the insects would be able to perform that current robotic grippers can’t. “It’s different, but what’s it trying to address?” he says.

Galipon didn’t specify what tasks the grippers would be useful for, saying: “To go to the next stage in robotics, we perhaps need to stop putting labels on things.”

There are also “all sorts of ethical questions around this work”, says Davis, particularly if researchers were to start trying to control when the animals grip and release objects.

Galipon says the animals weren’t harmed; after the experiment, the pill bugs were released back into the wild and the chitons continued to live in a water tank. “Especially for sentient animals, we would like to establish a kind of mutual interaction with a cooperative relationship,” says Galipon. “It’s a little bit different from domestication, but just a cooperation, where the animal can then go about its day.”

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Medical robots controlled by edible computer chips could deliver drugs inside the body, say researchers. Similar robots could also be used to deliver drugs or vital nutrients to at-risk animals and then naturally biodegrade.

Soft robots that can operate inside the human body are a busy area of research, but they tend to be remotely controlled from outside the body with magnets. Simple computers made from flexible tubes and devices that operate hydraulically – known as microfluidic computers – have been in …

Tiny robots packed with yeast speed up the fermentation of beer and eliminate the need to filter it before bottling.

Using living yeast to convert sugar to alcohol is a key part of making beer, but it can be time consuming, and the yeast can spoil and ruin a whole batch of the drink. Martin Pumera at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic and his colleagues thought that both issues could be addressed by swapping yeast for tiny, metallic yeast-filled bots.

They made the robots, …