Amsterdam, and The Netherlands more broadly, are world-renowned for the many urban canals and the boats that navigate them. But a boat traveling safely down a Dutch canal without a captain is not a common sight. At least not until the lidar-powered Roboat came along. Formed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Amsterdam…
When Ishan Khatri was little, he would pore over copies of Popular Science from the library, enamored with the futuristic vehicles, robots, and tools that filled the glossy, colorful pages, and the inspiring scientists, engineers, and designers making them. Today, he’s one of those engineers at Argo AI, the self-driving technology company headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He’s working on the…
An industrial robotic arm is an unusual choice for a dance partner, but it was the one sought after by Dr. Merritt Moore, a former dancer with the Norwegian National Ballet. Moore is also a quantum physicist and graduated with a PhD in atomic and laser physics from the University of Oxford in 2018. She’s…
Throughout its history, the nearly 142-year-old nonprofit organization League of American Bicyclists has advocated for the safety of the nation’s cyclists. “There’s so much conflict on our roadways,” says Ken McLeod, policy director at the League of American Bicyclists, “A lot of that is because of the way our roadways are designed, but also because of how…
Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess’s job revolves around making cars for people to drive, but last week, he went for a ride on the busy streets of Munich, Germany, in a vehicle unlike any he’d ever traveled in before: the autonomous driving ID. Buzz test vehicle developed in conjunction with VW’s partner Argo AI, an autonomous products and services…
They lurch and waddle. They fall, a lot. They cluster around the ball like a herd of mechanical toddlers at a Saturday morning scrimmage. Soccer may be the beautiful game, but there is nothing elegant about watching robots play it, even as we come up on the 25th anniversary of the Robot World Cup, or “RoboCup.”…
