We’ve talked a lot on the show about the many different skills robots are learning. Now we can tell you about Experimental Sport Tennis Wheelchair Robot, which is learning to play tennis.
The University of Cambridge did a study about robotic wellbeing coaches. And it turns out that if we want robots to help us help ourselves… they need to be cute.
Drones are becoming increasingly useful, but they can get damaged and grounded pretty quickly. A team at MIT has found bee-inspired workarounds that would keep impaired robotic crafts flying.
If you have fields, you almost certainly have weeds. Pulling them can take a lot of time or money, but farmers now have a new way to make that part of the job a lot easier: a weed-zapping robot that uses lasers.
MIRA is a small robotic surgery system that's set for testing on the International Space Station - and could end up helping astronauts prepare for long-term missions to the Moon as part of the Artemis project.
This month in 1907 waiters in Paris went on strike. Yes, they wanted better pay and improved working conditions, but their most high profile demand: they wanted the right to grow mustaches.
There really is a robot now called the Pipe-Worm. It's built to unclog pipes, and it does it by mimicking earthworms.
It's called the Intrepid Benthic Rover II, and its five year (or more) mission is to explore the deep ocean, most of the time by itself. Plus: in a new book artist Marina Luz paints the covers of books where people are trying to describe a book when they can’t remember the title.
Today in 1781, the first U.S. president, John Hanson, was elected. Of course, being a U.S. president in 1781 was very different from the job George Washington, the first president under the U.S. Constitution, would hold eight years later. Plus: the University of British Columbia has a robot named Robby to paint all the lines on its sports fields.
Summer is beach season, and for those times when people leave litter and other waste behind, there are two separate projects to develop robots to clean up after them. Plus: Sunny, the radiated tortoise at the Dallas Zoo, gets a personalized, hand-built scratching station for those hard-to-get itches.
