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. Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, L … | Continue reading
“How did you find me?” specialty coffee roaster Dajo Aertssen asked. He’d just handed me a bag of single-origin cascara, the dried flesh of coffee cherries, in his shop, Cafés Muda in Lille, France. “The AI sent us,” I replied. He looked puzzled, so I explained that my companion … | Continue reading
What’s a secret to getting more students to participate in an IEEE society? Give them a seat at the table so they have a say in how the organization is run. That’s what the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society has done. Budding engineers serve on the RAS board of directors, have … | Continue reading
Ever since Return of the Jedi premiered in 1983, people have been imagining the day when they, like the film’s protagonist Luke Skywalker, would get to ride speeder bikes that zip across the landscape while hovering just a few meters above the ground. In the intervening years, th … | Continue reading
Early on a June morning in 2023, my colleagues and I drove down a bumpy dirt road north of Kyiv in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Armed Forces were conducting training exercises nearby, and mortar shells arced through the sky. We arrived at a vast field for a technology demonstration set … | Continue reading
At some point, our phone habits changed. It used to be that if the phone rang, you answered it. With the advent of caller ID, you’d only pick up if it was someone you recognized. And now, with spoofing and robocalls, it can seem like a gamble to pick up the phone, period. In 2023 … | Continue reading
The IEEE Board of Directors shapes the future direction of IEEE and is committed to ensuring IEEE remains a strong and vibrant organization—serving the needs of its members and the engineering and technology community worldwide—while fulfilling the IEEE mission of advancing techn … | Continue reading
In the mid-1960s, Robert Kahn began thinking about how computers with different operating systems could talk to each other across a network. He didn’t think much about what they would say to one another, though. He was a theoretical guy, on leave from the faculty of the Massachus … | Continue reading
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. RoboCup German Open: 17–21 April 20 … | Continue reading
For more than 50 years, Deep Space Station 43 has been an invaluable tool for space probes as they explore our solar system and push into the beyond. The DSS-43 radio antenna, located at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, near Canberra, Australia, keeps open the line … | Continue reading
Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee recently announced that they have set a record for wireless EV charging. Their system’s magnetic coils have reached a 100-kilowatt power level. In tests in their lab, the researchers reported their system’s transmitter sup … | Continue reading
This sponsored article is brought to you by TE Automotive. Staying ahead of the curve in the ever-changing automotive landscape — no matter the vehicle powertrain — requires reliable, precision-engineered connectivity solutions and a trusted engineering partner you can count on. … | Continue reading
Stephen Cass: Hello and welcome to Fixing the Future, an IEEE Spectrum podcast where we look at concrete solutions to tough problems. I’m your host, Stephen Cass, a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. And before I start, I just want to tell you that you can get the latest coverage of … | Continue reading
Boston Dynamics has just introduced a new Atlas humanoid robot, replacing the legendary hydraulic Atlas and intended to be a commercial product. This is huge news from the company that has spent the last decade building the most dynamic humanoids that the world has ever seen, and … | Continue reading
Yesterday, Boston Dynamics bid farewell to the iconic Atlas humanoid robot. Or, the hydraulically-powered version of Atlas, anyway—if you read between the lines of the video description (or even just read the actual lines of the video description), it was pretty clear that althou … | Continue reading
As the history committee chair of the IEEE Lone Star Section, in San Antonio, Texas, I am responsible for documenting, preserving, and raising the visibility of technologies developed in the local area. One such technology is the Datapoint 2200, a programmable terminal that laid … | Continue reading
One of the management guru Peter Drucker’s most over-quoted turns of phrase is “what gets measured gets improved.” But it’s over-quoted for a reason: It’s true. Nowhere is it truer than in technology over the past 50 years. Moore’s law—which predicts that the number of transistor … | Continue reading
A consortium of U.S. federal agencies has pooled their funds and wide array of expertise to reinvent the emergency vehicle. The hybrid electric box truck they’ve come up with is carbon neutral. And in the aftermath of a natural disaster like a tornado or wildfire, the vehicle, ca … | Continue reading
In a new video posted today, Boston Dynamics is sending off its hydraulic Atlas humanoid robot. “For almost a decade,” the video description reads, “Atlas has sparked our imagination, inspired the next generations of roboticists, and leapt over technical barriers in the field. No … | Continue reading
AI hiring has been growing at least slightly in most regions around the world, with Hong Kong leading the pack; however, AI careers are losing ground compared with the overall job market, according to the 2024 AI Index Report. This annual effort by Stanford’s Institute for Human- … | Continue reading
Each year, the AI Index lands on virtual desks with a louder virtual thud—this year, its 393 pages are a testament to the fact that AI is coming off a really big year in 2023. For the past three years, IEEE Spectrum has read the whole damn thing and pulled out a selection of char … | Continue reading
Among the countless challenges of decarbonizing transportation, one of the most compelling involves electric motors. In laboratories all over the world, researchers are now chasing a breakthrough that could kick into high gear the transition to electric transportation: a rugged, … | Continue reading
In 2016, the Japanese government announced a plan for the emergence of a new kind of society. Human civilization, the proposal explained, had begun with hunter-gatherers, passed through the agrarian and industrial stages, and was fast approaching the end of the information age. A … | Continue reading
It’s late in the afternoon of 2 April 2023 on the island of Kauai. The sun is sinking over this beautiful and peaceful place, when, suddenly, at 4:25 pm, there’s a glitch: The largest generator on the island, a 26-megawatt oil-fired turbine, goes offline. This is a more urgent pr … | Continue reading
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. RoboCup German Open: 17–21 April 20 … | Continue reading
We tend to think about hopping robots from the ground up. That is, they start on the ground, and then, by hopping, incorporate a aerial phase into their locomotion. But there’s no reason why aerial robots can’t approach hopping from the other direction, by adding a hopping ground … | Continue reading
The idea of powering civilization from gigantic solar plants in orbit is older than any space program, but despite seven decades of rocket science, the concept—to gather near-constant sunlight tens of thousands of kilometers above the equator, beam it to Earth as microwaves, and … | Continue reading
Last December, the AI Institute announced that it was opening an office in Zurich as a European counterpart to its Boston headquarters, and recruited Marco Hutter to helm the office. Hutter also runs the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, arguably best known as the origin of the … | Continue reading
Rapid and resourceful technological improvisation has long been a mainstay of warfare, but the war in Ukraine is taking it to a new level. This improvisation is most conspicuous in the ceaselessly evolving struggle between weaponized drones and electronic warfare, a cornerstone o … | Continue reading
No matter where professionals are in their tech career—whether just starting out or well established—it’s never a bad time for them to reassess their skills to ensure they are aligned with market needs. As the professional home for engineers and technical professionals, IEEE offe … | Continue reading
Although the race to power the massive ambitions of AI companies might seem like it’s all about Nvidia, there is a real competition going in AI accelerator chips. The latest example: At Intel’s Vision 2024 event this week in Phoenix, Az., the company gave the first architectural … | Continue reading
I’ve enjoyed reading magazine articles about Ethernet’s 50th anniversary, including one in the The Institute. Invented by computer scientists Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs, Ethernet has been extraordinarily impactful. Metcalfe, an IEEE Fellow, received the 1996 IEEE Medal of Ho … | Continue reading
You can’t see, hear, taste, feel, or smell it, but software is everywhere around us. It underpins modern civilization even while consuming more energy, wealth, and time than it needs to and burping out a significant amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The software indus … | Continue reading
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. RoboCup German Open: 17–21 April 20 … | Continue reading
The stretchable battery is gaining momentum in the electronics industry, where it might one day serve as an energy storage medium in fitness trackers, wearable electronics, and even smart clothing. Researchers believe the concept will become more valuable in the next decade, as e … | Continue reading
The IEEE Jamaica Section is acting as a catalyst to engage and inspire the island nation’s next generation of engineering and technology professionals. The section held a first-of-its-kind workshop in January at the University of Technology in Kingston. The event attracted more t … | Continue reading
Stephen Cass: Hello and welcome to Fixing the Future, an IEEE Spectrum podcast where we look at concrete solutions to tough problems. I’m your host, Stephen Cass, a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. And before we start, I just want to tell you that you can get the latest coverage f … | Continue reading
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, Ernie Smith’s newsletter, which hunts for the end of the long tail. If you ask the average person what the company 3M does, odds are if they have a few gray hairs hanging out on their scalp, they might say that the company mak … | Continue reading
When we think about robotic manipulation, the default is usually to think about grippers—about robots using manipulators (like fingers or other end effectors) to interact with objects. For most humans, though, interacting with objects can be a lot more complicated, and we use wha … | Continue reading
Ours is a data-centric world. Many modern inventions and occupations rely on data. Artificial intelligence feasts on it. Machine learning identifies patterns within it. Internet of Things devices generate and transmit it. Genomics, bioinformatics, climate science, telecommunicati … | Continue reading
To call L. Ron Hubbard a prolific writer is an extreme understatement. From 1934 to 1940, he regularly penned 70,000 to 100,000 words per month of pulp fiction under 15 different pseudonyms published in various magazines. Not to be constrained by genre, he wrote zombie mysteries, … | Continue reading
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. RoboCup German Open: 17–21 April 20 … | Continue reading
The upper 10 kilometers of the Earth’s crust contains vast geothermal reserves, essentially awaiting human energy consumption to begin to tap into its unstinting power output—which itself yields no greenhouse gasses. And yet, geothermal sources currently produce only three-tenths … | Continue reading
At NVIDIA GTC last week, Boston Dynamics CTO Aaron Saunders gave a talk about deploying AI in real world robots—namely, how Spot is leveraging reinforcement learning to get better at locomotion (We spoke with Saunders last year about robots falling over). And Spot has gotten a lo … | Continue reading
Apple’s Vision Pro headset might just be the breakthrough product that the augmented-reality industry has been waiting for to catalyze the widespread adoption of AR technology, according to the IEEE’s AR Alliance. The new alliance’s goal is to foster and encourage the development … | Continue reading
To gain a better understanding of the brain, why not draw inspiration from it? At least, that’s what researchers at Brown University did, by building a wireless communications system that mimics the brain using an array of tiny silicon sensors, each the size of a grain of sand. T … | Continue reading
In 1997 the IBM Deep Blue supercomputer defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. It was a groundbreaking demonstration of supercomputer technology and a first glimpse into how high-performance computing might one day overtake human-level intelligence. In the 10 years that fo … | Continue reading
All right, confession time. I don’t use my handheld ham radio for much more than eavesdropping on the subway dispatcher when my train rumbles to a mysterious halt in a dark tunnel. But even I couldn’t help but hear the buzz surrounding a new handheld, Quansheng’s UV-K5. It caught … | Continue reading