A human clearing junk out of an attic can often guess the contents of a box simply by picking it up and giving it a shake, without the need to see what's inside. Researchers from MIT, Amazon Robotics, ...

In recent years, robots have gained artificial vision, touch, and even smell. "Researchers have been giving robots human-like perception," says MIT Associate Professor Fadel Adib. In a new paper, Adib ...

Researchers worldwide have been working hard to give robots the ability to better sense the environment around them. Before robots can work side-by-side with humans, they have to be able to sense ...

Michelle Starr is CNET's science editor, and she hopes to get you as enthralled with the wonders of the universe as she is. When she's not daydreaming about flying through space, she's daydreaming ...

When you think of tracked robots, you might think of bomb disposal robots or others used in military applications. You probably haven’t seen anything quite like this, however—it’s a “reconfigurable ...

Imagine a coffee cup sitting on a table. Now, imagine a book partially obscuring the cup. As humans, we still know what the coffee cup is even though we can't see all of it. But a robot might be ...

Vision technology is shifting from image capture to object recognition and tracking. Robots with advanced 3D capability can differentiate objects, perceive human form. How autonomous robots are ...

Can a robot figure out how heavy or soft an object is without using a single camera or force sensor? According to a recent arXiv paper, the answer is yes—and the solution lies entirely in how the ...

RF Grasp is a picking robot that combines vision with radio frequency (RF) sensing to find and grasps objects, even if they're hidden from view. The technology could aid fulfillment in e-commerce ...