AI Companion Robots Are Closing the Human Connection in Modern Homes
This article is brought to you by Ollobot.From about 2017, individuals began to truly connect with the initial wave of companion robots. These devices had personality, moved around, joked, and answered when you spoke to them. Most early companion robots, however, were still limited by simple voice-command interactions and narrow functionality. Once the novelty wore…
Video Friday: An Earthbound Mars Rover for the Moon
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEYSummer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUEActuate 2026:…
Award-Winning Researcher Trains Robots to Make Educated Guesses
Yen-Ling Kuo always wanted to understand how things worked. When she was growing up in Taiwan, reading the story of Michael Faraday in elementary school piqued her curiosity about the natural world. During that time, she was introduced to Logo, a computer program with a turtle cursor to help children learn basic coding through hands-on…
Event-Based Desnowing for Autonomous Driving
Adverse weather conditions, particularly heavy snowfall, pose significant challenges to both human drivers and autonomous vehicles. Traditional image-based desnowing methods often introduce hallucination artifacts as they rely solely on spatial information, while video-based approaches require high frame rates and suffer from alignment artifacts at lower frame rates. Camera parameters, such as exposure time, also influence…
Let us Make a Splan: Risk-Aware Trajectory Optimization in a Normalized Gaussian Splat
Neural radiance fields and Gaussian splatting have recently transformed computer vision by enabling photorealistic representations of complex scenes. However, they have seen limited applications in real-world robotics tasks, such as trajectory optimization. This is due to the difficulty in reasoning about collisions in radiance models and the computational complexity associated with operating in dense models.…
Let us Make a Splan: Risk-Aware Trajectory Optimization in a Normalized Gaussian Splat
Neural radiance fields and Gaussian splatting have recently transformed computer vision by enabling photorealistic representations of complex scenes. However, they have seen limited applications in real-world robotics tasks, such as trajectory optimization. This is due to the difficulty in reasoning about collisions in radiance models and the computational complexity associated with operating in dense models.…
Look for These 7 New Technologies at the Airport
Take a look around the airport during your travels this summer and you might spot a string of new technologies at every touchpoint: from pre-arrival, bag drop, and security to the moment you board the plane.In this new world, your face is your boarding pass, your electronic luggage tag transforms itself for each new flight,…