We’ve all seen videos over the past few years demonstrating how agile humanoid robots have become, running and jumping with ease. We’re no longer surprised by this kind of agility—in fact, we’ve grown to expect it. The problem is, these shiny demos lack real-world applications. When it comes to creating robots that are useful and safe around humans, the fundamentals of movement are more important. As a result, researchers are using the same techniques to train humanoid robots to achieve much more modest goals.  Alan Fern, a professor of computer science at Oregon State University, and a team of researchers […]

Across the country, hundreds of thousands of drivers deliver packages and parcels to customers and companies each day, with many click-to-door times averaging only a few days. Coordinating a supply chain feat of this magnitude in a predictable and timely way is a longstanding problem of operations research, where researchers have been working to optimize the last leg of delivery routes. This is because the last phase of the process is often the costliest due to inefficiencies like long distances between stops due to increased ecommerce demand, weather delays, traffic, lack of parking availability, customer delivery preferences, or partially full […]

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The holy grail of robotics since the field’s beginning has been to build a robot that can do our housework. But for a long time, that has just been a dream. While roboticists have been able to get robots to do impressive things in the lab, such as parkour, this usually requires meticulous planning in a tightly-controlled setting. This makes it hard for robots to work reliably in homes around children and pets, homes have wildly […]