Robot vacuums have steadily improved their cleaning performance and object avoidance over the years, but during our testing at CNET Labs, we discovered an odd trade-off.

To help humans to complete everyday manual tasks, robots should be able to reliably manipulate everyday objects that vary in shape, texture and size. Many conventional approaches to enable robotic ...

Computer-aided design (CAD) systems are tried-and-true tools used to design many of the physical objects we use each day. But ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A human clearing junk out of an attic can often guess the contents of a box simply by picking it up and giving it a shake, without the need to see what’s inside. Researchers from MIT, ...

Imagine a coffee cup sitting on a table. Now, imagine a book partially obscuring the cup. As humans, we still know what the coffee cup is even though we can't see all of it. But a robot might be ...

While large language models (LLMs) have mastered text (and other modalities to some extent), they lack the physical "common sense" to operate in dynamic, real-world environments. This has limited the ...

With their bright blue bases, yellow gears, and exposed circuit tops, the 3D-printed robots look like a child’s toys. Yet as a roughly two-dozen-member collective, they can flow around obstacles ...