Robotics @ MIT

Letter writers across the country will soon have a fun and beautiful new Forever stamp to choose from, featuring novel research from the Media Lab’s Biomechatronics research group.  The stamp is part of a new U.S. Postal Service (USPS) series on innovation, representing computing, biomedicine, genome sequencing, robotics, and solar technology. For the robotics category, the […]

For humans, it can be challenging to manipulate thin flexible objects like ropes, wires, or cables. But if these problems are hard for humans, they are nearly impossible for robots. As a cable slides between the fingers, its shape is constantly changing, and the robot’s fingers must be constantly sensing and adjusting the cable’s position […]

With every droplet that we can’t see, touch, or feel dispersed into the air, the threat of spreading Covid-19 persists. It’s become increasingly critical to keep these heavy droplets from lingering — especially on surfaces, which are welcoming and generous hosts.  Thankfully, our chemical cleaning products are effective, but using them to disinfect larger settings […]

Every spring, the basement of the Ray and Maria Stata Center becomes a racetrack for tiny self-driving cars that tear through the halls one by one. Sprinting behind each car on foot is a team of three to six students, sometimes carrying wireless routers or open laptops extended out like Olympic torches. Lining the basement […]

One of the hottest topics in robotics is the field of soft robots, which utilizes squishy and flexible materials rather than traditional rigid materials. But soft robots have been limited due to their lack of good sensing. A good robotic gripper needs to feel what it is touching (tactile sensing), and it needs to sense […]

Albert Einstein famously postulated that “the only real valuable thing is intuition,” arguably one of the most important keys to understanding intention and communication.  But intuitiveness is hard to teach — especially to a machine. Looking to improve this, a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) came up with a method that dials […]

Training interactive robots may one day be an easy job for everyone, even those without programming expertise. Roboticists are developing automated robots that can learn new tasks solely by observing humans. At home, you might someday show a domestic robot how to do routine chores. In the workplace, you could train robots like new employees, […]

Car companies have been feverishly working to improve the technologies behind self-driving cars. But so far even the most high-tech vehicles still fail when it comes to safely navigating in rain and snow.  This is because these weather conditions wreak havoc on the most common approaches for sensing, which usually involve either lidar sensors or […]

For the first time, MIT researchers have enabled a soft robotic arm to understand its configuration in 3D space, by leveraging only motion and position data from its own “sensorized” skin. Soft robots constructed from highly compliant materials, similar to those found in living organisms, are being championed as safer, and more adaptable, resilient, and […]

As the geriatric population is expected to balloon in the coming decade, so too will rates of heart disease in the United States. The demand for prosthetic heart valves and other cardiac devices — a market that is valued at more than $5 billion dollars today — is predicted to rise by almost 13 percent […]

In the age of Alexa, YouTube recommendations, and Spotify playlists, artificial intelligence has become a way of life, improving marketing and advertising, e-commerce, and more. But what are the ethical implications of technology that collects and learns personal information? How should society navigate these issues and shape the future? A new curriculum designed for middle […]

“My goal is to make computing ‘normal’ for girls,” says Sabina Chen from Lincoln Laboratory’s Advanced Capabilities and Systems Group, who led a workshop that taught middle school girls how to program a robotic car to autonomously follow colored cones. The girls attended this enrichment class for eight consecutive Saturdays from September to November. “The […]

In its first year of operation, the Intelligent Towing Tank (ITT) conducted about 100,000 total experiments, essentially completing the equivalent of a PhD student’s five years’ worth of experiments in a matter of weeks. The automated experimental facility, developed in the MIT Sea Grant Hydrodynamics Laboratory, automatically and adaptively performs, analyzes, and designs experiments exploring […

Functional, intelligent robots the size of a single cell are within reach, said Cornell University Professor Paul McEuen at the inaugural Mildred S. Dresselhaus Lecture at MIT on Nov. 13. “To build a robot that is on the scale of 100 microns in size, and have it work, that’s a big dream,” said McEuen, the […]

MIT researchers have invented a way to efficiently optimize the control and design of soft robots for target tasks, which has traditionally been a monumental undertaking in computation. Soft robots have springy, flexible, stretchy bodies that can essentially move an infinite number of ways at any given moment. Computationally, this represents a highly complex “state […]

Self-driving cars are coming. But for all their fancy sensors and intricate data-crunching abilities, even the most cutting-edge cars lack something that (almost) every 16-year-old with a learner’s permit has: social awareness. While autonomous technologies have improved substantially, they still ultimately view the drivers around them as obstacles made up of ones and zeros, rather […]

In today’s factories and warehouses, it’s not uncommon to see robots whizzing about, shuttling items or tools from one station to another. For the most part, robots navigate pretty easily across open layouts. But they have a much harder time winding through narrow spaces to carry out tasks such as reaching for a product at […]

An autonomous robotic system invented by researchers at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) efficiently sniffs out the most scientifically interesting — but hard-to-find — sampling spots in vast, unexplored waters. Environmental scientists are often interested in gathering samples at the most interesting locations, or “maxima,” in an environment. One example could be a [&…

MIT and Toyota researchers have designed a new model to help autonomous vehicles determine when it’s safe to merge into traffic at intersections with obstructed views. Navigating intersections can be dangerous for driverless cars and humans alike. In 2016, roughly 23 percent of fatal and 32 percent of nonfatal U.S. traffic accidents occurred at intersections, […]

In the not too distant future, robots may be dispatched as last-mile delivery vehicles to drop your takeout order, package, or meal-kit subscription at your doorstep — if they can find the door. Standard approaches for robotic navigation involve mapping an area ahead of time, then using algorithms to guide a robot toward a specific […]