Robohub
Non-profit platform sharing robotics news and expert perspectives from research, startups, industry, and education
Robot Talk Episode 151 – Robots to Study the Ocean, with Simona Aracri
Claire interviews Simona Aracri of Italy's National Research Council about cutting‑edge ocean‑robotics. Aracri’s work blends innovative sensors with autonomous platforms to expand observational oceanography. She has logged over six months aboard research vessels in the Mediterranean, Pacific and North Sea, testing new robotic designs. Her background includes a post‑doctoral stint on the award‑winning ORCA Hub project in Edinburgh, focusing on offshore robotic sensors.
Generative AI Improves a Wireless Vision System that Sees Through Obstructions
MIT researchers have combined generative AI with millimeter‑wave radar to reconstruct hidden 3D objects and entire indoor scenes. The new Wave‑Former model fills missing surfaces in partial mmWave scans, improving shape accuracy by roughly 20 %. A companion system, RISE, uses...
Back to School: Robots Learn From Factory Workers
Czech startup RoboTwin has introduced a handheld, no‑code system that lets factory workers teach industrial robots new tasks by simply demonstrating the motion. The device captures movements in about a minute and converts them into robot programs, opening automation to...
Resource-Sharing Boosts Robotic Resilience
Researchers at EPFL’s Reconfigurable Robotics Laboratory introduced a hyper‑redundancy framework that lets modular robots share power, sensing and communication resources across all units. In the Mori3 origami robot, this local resource‑sharing revived a completely dead module, allowing the four‑module system...
A Multi-Armed Robot for Assisting with Agricultural Tasks
Researchers at West Virginia University introduced a force‑aware manipulation system for agricultural robots, enabling one arm to safely move plant branches and expose hidden flowers or fruit for a second arm. The method combines an RRT*‑based planner with a geometric...
Coding for Underwater Robotics
Ivy Mahncke, an Olin College robotics undergraduate, spent her MIT Lincoln Laboratory summer internship developing a collaborative navigation algorithm for divers and underwater vehicles. The algorithm addresses the lack of GPS by fusing acoustic and sensor data, and was field‑tested...
Restoring Surgeons’ Sense of Touch with Robotic Fingertips
A Europe‑wide EU‑funded consortium called PALPABLE is creating a soft‑robotic fingertip that restores tactile perception for minimally invasive and robotic surgery. The device uses fibre‑optic sensors embedded in a silicone dome to translate tissue deformation into visual stiffness maps, helping...
I Developed an App that Uses Drone Footage to Track Plastic Litter on Beaches
University of Limerick researchers have created a drone‑based system that uses computer‑vision AI to locate plastic litter on beaches and feeds the data into a free mobile app. The platform can identify objects as small as 1 cm from 30 m altitude...
Translating Music Into Light and Motion with Robots
University of Waterloo researchers unveiled a swarm of soccer‑ball‑sized robots that paint with coloured light trails in response to musical cues such as tempo and chord progressions. The system captures the robots' movements on a floor‑mounted camera, creating a visual...
Robot Talk Episode 145 – Robotics and Automation in Manufacturing, with Agata Suwala
Technology manager Agata Suwala at the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) is steering advanced robotics projects that modernise aerospace production lines. Her team integrates automation to replace labour‑intensive steps, cutting cycle times and error rates. The latest initiative targets a circular‑economy...
“Robot, Make Me a Chair”
MIT researchers unveiled an AI‑driven robotic assembly platform that turns natural‑language prompts into physical objects. A generative AI creates a 3‑D mesh, while a vision‑language model determines component placement, enabling a robot to assemble furniture from reusable parts. The system...
Robot Talk Episode 144 – Robot Trust in Humans, with Samuele Vinanzi
In a recent Robot Talk episode, senior lecturer Samuele Vinanzi discussed how robots can evaluate human trustworthiness using behavioral cues. His work in cognitive robotics merges AI, psychology, and cognitive science to give machines social awareness. Vinanzi’s research emphasizes emotional...
Robot Talk Episode 143 – Robots for Children, with Elmira Yadollahi
Robot Talk’s Episode 143 featured Elmira Yadollahi, an assistant professor at Lancaster University, discussing how children interact with robots. Yadollahi’s research focuses on explainability, multimodal perception, and managing expectations to build trust and AI literacy among young users. She has...
Robot Talk Episode 142 – Collaborative Robot Arms, with Mark Gray
Universal Robots' Mark Gray discussed the company's lightweight collaborative robot arms on Robot Talk Episode 142. The cobots, weighing under 20 kg, are designed for safe, direct interaction with human workers and have been deployed in leading UK research centers such...
Robot Talk Episode 141 – Our Relationship with Robot Swarms, with Razanne Abu-Aisheh
Claire interviews Razanne Abu‑Aisheh, a senior researcher at the University of Bristol, about how people perceive and interact with robot swarms. Abu‑Aisheh explains that collective robot behaviours heavily influence human attitudes, and she advocates for community‑centred, inclusive design to shape...
