1 United Arab Emirates Dirham = 3.3062 Botswana Pula

1 Sri Lanka Rupee = 0.0651 Botswana Pula

1 Algerian Dinar = 0.0946 Botswana Pula

1 Indonesian Rupiah = 0.0008 Botswana Pula

1 Lithuanian Lita = 4.1129 Botswana Pula

1 Nigerian Naira = 0.0311 Botswana Pula

1 Czech Republic Koruna = 0.4832 Botswana Pula

1 Bolivian Boliviano = 1.7611 Botswana Pula

1 Japanese Yen = 0.1138 Botswana Pula

Teleoperated robots can help perform patient care tasks while keeping healthcare workers safe

They can take care of riskier duties of the staff, says the company’s CEO

Full Text:

National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded researchers from North Carolina State and Elon universities have developed a technique that allows them to remotely control the movement of soft robots, lock them into position for as long as needed and later reconfigure the robots into new shapes. The technique relies on light and magnetic fields. "By engineering the properties of the material, we can control the soft robot's movement remotely; we can get it to hold a given shape; we can then return the robot to its original shape or further modify its movement; and we can do this repeatedly. All of those things are valuable, in terms of this technology's utility in biomedical or aerospace applications," says Joe Tracy, a professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and corresponding author of a paper on the work. In experimental testing, the researchers demonstrated that the soft robots could be used to form "grabbers" for lifting and transporting objects. The soft robots could also be used as cantilevers or folded into "flowers" with petals that bend in different directions. "We are not limited to binary configurations, such as a grabber being either open or closed," says Jessica Liu, first author of the paper and a Ph.D. student at NC State. "We can control the light to ensure that a robot will hold its shape at any point."

Image credit: Jessica A.C. Liu

Full Text:

National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded researchers from North Carolina State and Elon universities have developed a technique that allows them to remotely control the movement of soft robots, lock them into position for as long as needed and later reconfigure the robots into new shapes. The technique relies on light and magnetic fields. "By engineering the properties of the material, we can control the soft robot's movement remotely; we can get it to hold a given shape; we can then return the robot to its original shape or further modify its movement; and we can do this repeatedly. All of those things are valuable, in terms of this technology's utility in biomedical or aerospace applications," says Joe Tracy, a professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and corresponding author of a paper on the work. In experimental testing, the researchers demonstrated that the soft robots could be used to form "grabbers" for lifting and transporting objects. The soft robots could also be used as cantilevers or folded into "flowers" with petals that bend in different directions. "We are not limited to binary configurations, such as a grabber being either open or closed," says Jessica Liu, first author of the paper and a Ph.D. student at NC State. "We can control the light to ensure that a robot will hold its shape at any point."

Image credit: Jessica A.C. Liu

Researchers have developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based system to detect Twitter bots after identifying differences in their short-term behaviour from humans on the social media platform.

A destructive display of batting power propelled Watford Haidery to their first Watford Observer Fourteen14 Shield triumph for 30 years as holders Abbots Langley were swept aside by more than 100 runs in last night’s final.

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Robots are taking jobs from tax-paying, product-consuming human beings and a lot of people are talking about it. How will these people live?

Her application inspires Paris Summer Innovation Fellowship selection officials to look beyond age and take a chance on a kid with passion.

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Russian tycoon Dmitry Itskov says the technology will be a reality by 2045.

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Boston Dynamics robots imitate human and animal movements, making them impressive — and a little creepy.

MIT's Biomimetics department releases video of Mini Cheetah robots frolicking in the leaves.

Parallel robot ideal for use in the food and beverage, pharmaceutical, and healthcare industries(Hornet 565)

Four-axis parallel robot achieves high speed and high precision(Quattro 650H / HS)

Four-axis parallel robot achieves high speed and high precision(Quattro 800H / HS)

Mid-size SCARA robot for precision machining, assembly, and material handling(eCobra 600 Lite / Standard / Pro)

Large SCARA robot for precision machining, assembly, and material handling(eCobra 800 Lite / Standard / Pro)

Articulated robot for machining, assembly, and material handling(Viper 650)

Overhead-mount large SCARA robot for precision machining, assembly, and material handling(eCobra 800 Inverted Lite / Standard / Pro)

Articulated robot for machining, assembly, and material handling(Viper 850)

Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), self-mapping, self-navigating.(LD Series)

Mid-size SCARA robot for material handling, assembly, precision machining and adhesive application(Cobra 450)

Mid-size SCARA robot for material handling, assembly, precision machining and adhesive application(Cobra 650)

Mid-size SCARA robot for material handling, assembly, precision machining and adhesive application(Cobra 500)

Collaborative robot for assembly, packaging, inspection and logistics(TM Series)

Marketing scientist Kevin Gray asks Dr. Anna Farzindar of the University of Southern California about chatbots and the ways they are used.

James Bessen, economist and former software executive, on what we can learn from 19th century mill workers about innovation, wages, and technology.

Matt Beane, assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, finds that robots, machine learning, and AI are changing how we train for our jobs — not just how we do them. His study shows that robot-assisted surgery is disrupting the traditional learning pathway of younger physicians. He says this trend is emerging in many industries, from finance to law enforcement to education. And he shares lessons from trainees who are successfully working around these new barriers. Beane is the author of the HBR article “Learning to Work with Intelligent Machines.”

Assistive shared-control robots have the potential to transform the lives of millions of people afflicted with severe motor impairments. The usefulness of shared-control robots typically relies on the underlying autonomy's ability to infer the user's needs and intentions, and the ability to do so unambiguously is often a limiting factor for providing appropriate assistance confidently and accurately. The contributions of this paper are four-fold. First, we introduce the idea of intent disambiguation via control mode selection, and present a mathematical formalism for the same. Second, we develop a control mode selection algorithm which selects the control mode in which the user-initiated motion helps the autonomy to maximally disambiguate user intent. Third, we present a pilot study with eight subjects to evaluate the efficacy of the disambiguation algorithm. Our results suggest that the disambiguation system (a) helps to significantly reduce task effort, as measured by number of button presses, and (b) is of greater utility for more limited control interfaces and more complex tasks. We also observe that (c) subjects demonstrated a wide range of disambiguation request behaviors, with the common thread of concentrating requests early in the execution. As our last contribution, we introduce a novel field-theoretic approach to intent inference inspired by dynamic field theory that works in tandem with the disambiguation scheme.