An interesting research centre in California! Focus areas: Business Services Electronic Materials, Devices, & Systems Information & Communication Technologies Biomedical Systems Cleantech
XEROX PARC was definitely heavily involved in computer development: eg. mouse, GUI, ethernet, OO programming, all came out of PARC, and all that without focusing on computers but printers...
A bit of an older story, but I was quite impressed (as a robotics non-expert) by the movement in the video. To me it shows the power of the brain and the "eagerness" (lack of better word) at which it tries to exert some control in the world around it.
Typically, we send rovers to our planetary neighbors one at a time -- but what if we sent a small team of smaller, less impressive robots instead? That's the idea NASA is exploring at Kennedy Space Center with Swarmies: a quartet of four autonomous robots designed to work together to complete a single mission.
Hasta la vista, baby. A real-life T-1000, the shape-shifting liquid-metal robot from Terminator 2, is a step closer, thanks to a self-powered liquid metal motor. The device is surprisingly simple: just a drop of metal alloy made mostly of gallium - which is liquid at just under 30 °C - with some indium and tin mixed in.
Eve, an artificially-intelligent 'robot scientist' could make drug discovery faster and much cheaper, say researchers writing in the Royal Society journal Interface. The team has demonstrated the success of the approach as Eve discovered that a compound shown to have anti-cancer properties might also be used in the fight against malaria.
Babies learn about the world by exploring how their bodies move in space, grabbing toys, pushing things off tables and by watching and imitating what adults are doing. But when roboticists want to teach a robot how to do a task, they typically either write code or physically move a robot's arm or body to show it how to perform an action.
Swarm-based fabrication of interwoven composite tubes via a fully autonomous, cooperative system can help create architectural-scale structures in effective and efficient ways, including in remote environments.