In an update to a five-year project from CSAIL and the Senseable City Lab, researchers have been developing the world's first fleet of autonomous boats for the City of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and have recently added a new, larger vessel to the group: “Roboat II.”

In contrast to the advanced tactile insights of humans, the robots that we’ve spent decades developing don’t even have the tactile skills of toddlers. This matters as systems with so-called “haptic sensors” are increasingly used not just in factories, but stores, offices and even people’s homes. 

As more intelligent, independent machines make their way into the public sphere, engineers Julie Shah and Laura Major are urging designers to rethink not just how robots fit in with society, but also how society can change to accommodate these new, “working” robots.

Most new roboticists want to program their robots to solve interesting, complex tasks — but it turns out that just moving them through space without colliding with objects is more difficult than it sounds.

For humans, it can be challenging to manipulate thin flexible objects like ropes, wires, or cables. But if these problems are hard for humans, they are nearly impossible for robots. As a cable slides between the fingers, its shape is constantly changing, and the robot’s fingers must be constantly sensing and adjusting the cable’s position and motion.

A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), in collaboration with Ava Robotics and the Greater Boston Food Bank (GBFB), designed a new robotic system that powerfully disinfects surfaces and neutralizes aerosolized forms of the coronavirus.

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) companies have been working for years on developing systems that can incorporate real-life objects into their digitized worlds. With that in mind, a team from CSAIL has developed a smart glove that can detect your hand pose, as well as distinguish between more than 30 different household objects.