Category archives: Robotics

The Good Bad Robots

The Good Bad Robots

EthicsRobotics

By Inko Elgezua

Robots will be ubiquitous in the near future, few people would argue against that, with some authors even talking of a “ Cambrian Explosion of robotics ” . This bigger presence of robots in our daily life has accelerated the subfield of roboethics , which is trying to establish how we must design, use and […]

Shortcuts for efficiently moving a quadrotor throughout the Special Euclidean Group SE(3) (and 2)

Shortcuts for efficiently moving a quadrotor throughout the Special Euclidean Group SE(3) (and 2)

Computer scienceRobotics

By José Luis Blanco

We devoted the first part of this article to introducing the problem of motion planning for autonomous vehicles at a qualitative level and to briefly describing two of the most commonly-used algorithms, RRT and RRT* . Next, we will continue getting into deeper mathematical details about the topological structure of the state spaces associated to […]

Robot navigation on Mars

Robot navigation on Mars

Robotics

By Julián Estévez

Three main incorporations of physical robots are forecasted in our lives: transport, assistance and factory robots. Design and requisites of these different kinds are quite different, but one particularly is attracting researchers’ efforts: navigation. While transport robotics is located outdoors, the rest two are indoors. Outdoors machines can make use of a GPS (among other […]

Shortcuts for efficiently moving a quadrotor through the Special Euclidean Group SE(3) (1)

Shortcuts for efficiently moving a quadrotor through the Special Euclidean Group SE(3) (1)

Computer scienceRobotics

By José Luis Blanco

Undoubtedly, the most popular aspect of driverless cars, autonomous drones and quadrotors are the cool videos we are getting accustomed to seeing around. However, behind each of those spectacular demonstrations there is a large amount of work, both practical and theoretical. In this series of articles we will shed some light on one of the […]

Robotic flies manage to fly

Robotic flies manage to fly

Robotics

By Carlos Casanueva

Some years ago, with a sudden and drastic reduction on the number of honeybees, scientists realized that if these insects disappeared it would be the end of agriculture as we understand it, as they are the main drivers of agricultural pollination in the US . But would we be able to replace these pollinators with […]

Laser spectrochemistry beyond Earth’s boundaries: Curiosity’s Chemcam

Laser spectrochemistry beyond Earth’s boundaries: Curiosity’s Chemcam

ChemistryPhysicsRobotics

By Paola Vega

It is well known that an accurate and energetic laser shot can melt, ionize and excite the material in which the light is focused, creating very bright plasmas after the interaction. Valuable information can be obtained from the light emitted by the plasma, such as the elemental composition of the material itself or the environment […]

Rapidly Exploring Manifolds: when going from A to B ain’t easy

Rapidly Exploring Manifolds: when going from A to B ain’t easy

Robotics

By José Luis Blanco

We will address a recent article by Jaillet and Porta (Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, IRI), which reveals new practical applications of highly-abstract mathematical entities. When it comes to robots, we can’t forget that their fundamental goal is always somehow related to moving stuff. Arm robots as those found in the automotive industries are […]