分类：Robotics

Researchers have developed revolutionary new robots that adapt to the culture and customs of the elderly people they assist.

During more than 25 years as a factory worker, David Young has seen a parade of robots take over tasks he and his colleagues used to do by hand.

For several years, civil society groups have been calling for a ban on what they call "killer robots". Scores of technologists have lent their voice to the cause. Some two dozen governments now support a ban and several others would like to see some kind of international regulation.

Semi-autonomous and autonomous machines and robots can become moral machines using annotated decision trees containing ethical assumptions or justifications for interactions with animals.

A dividing line is emerging in the debate over so-called killer robots. Many countries want to see new international law on autonomous weapon systems that can target and kill people without human intervention. But those countries already developing such weapons are instead trying to highlight their supposed benefits.

It has played football with former US president Barack Obama and danced for German leader Angela Merkel, but Honda's ASIMO robot may have reached the end of the line.

With the push of a button, months of hard work were about to be put to the test. Sixteen teams of engineers convened in a cavernous exhibit hall in Nagoya, Japan, for the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge. The robotic systems they built were tasked with removing items from bins and placing them into boxes. For graduate student Maria Bauza, who served as task-planning lead for the MIT-Princeton Team, the moment was particularly nerve-wracking.

A research team is helping robot developers design machines less likely to injure the humans they work with. How? With their novel 'safety map."

The path from university lab to commercialization is especially complex in the biotech industry. Challenges range from long lead times, sometimes measured in decades, to the costs of transforming ideas into innovations, as well as issues of intellectual property, patenting and licensing.

Touching and grasping objects are surprisingly complex processes, an area where contemporary robots are still clumsy. Principal investigator Jukka Häkkinen, Ph.D., and post-doctoral researcher Jussi Hakala, D.Sc. (Tech), have developed an imaging method for measuring human touch.