When Language Models Learn to See and Create

A new prototype is laying claim to the title of smallest, lightest untethered flying robot. At less than a centimeter in wingspan, the wirelessly powered robot is currently very limited in how far it can travel away from the magnetic fields that drive its flight. However, the scientists who developed it suggest there are ways to boost its range, which could lead to potential applications such as search and rescue operations, inspecting damaged machinery in industrial settings, and even plant pollination. One strategy to shrink flying robots involves removing their batteries and supplying them electricity using tethers. However, tethered flying robots face problems operating freely in complex environments. This has led some researchers to explore wireless methods of powering robot flight. “The dream was to make flying robots to fly anywhere and anytime without using an electrical wire for the power source,” says Liwei Lin, a professor of mechanical engineering at University of California at Berkeley. Lin and his fellow researchers detailed their findings in Science Advances. 3D-Printed Flying Robot Design Each flying robot has a 3D-printed body that consists of a propeller with four blades. This rotor is encircled by a ring that helps the robot stay balanced during flight. On top of each body are two tiny permanent magnets. All in all, the insect-scale prototypes have wingspans as small as 9.4 millimeters and weigh as little as 21 milligrams. Previously, the smallest reported flying robot, either tethered or untethered, was 28 millimeters wide. When exposed to an external alternating magnetic field, the robots spin and fly without tethers. The lowest magnetic field strength needed to maintain flight is 3.1 millitesla. (In comparison, a refrigerator magnet has a strength of about 10 mT.) When the applied magnetic field alternates with a frequency of 310 hertz, the robots can hover. At 340 Hz, they accelerate upward. The researchers could steer the robots laterally by adjusting the applied magnetic fields. The robots could also right themselves after collisions to stay airborne without complex sensing or controlling electronics, as long as the impacts were not too large. Experiments show the lift force the robots generate can exceed their weight by 14 percent, to help them carry payloads. For instance, a prototype that’s 20.5 millimeters wide and weighing 162.4 milligrams could carry an infrared sensor weighing 110 mg to scan its environment. The robots proved efficient at converting the energy given them into lift force—better than nearly all other reported flying robots, tethered or untethered, and also better than fruit flies and hummingbirds. Currently the maximum operating range of these prototypes is about 10 centimeters away from the magnetic coils. One way to extend the operating range of these robots is to increase the magnetic field strength they experience tenfold by adding more coils, optimizing the configuration of these coils, and using beamforming coils, Lin notes. Such developments could allow the robots to fly up to a meter away from the magnetic coils. The scientists could also miniaturize the robots even further. This would make them lighter, and so reduce the magnetic field strength they need for propulsion. “It could be possible to drive micro flying robots using electromagnetic waves such as those in radio or cell phone transmission signals,” Lin says. Future research could also place devices that can convert magnetic energy to electricity onboard the robots to power electronic components, the researchers add.

Machine learning for software engineers 3-28-25

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. RoboSoft 2025: 23–26 April 2025, LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND ICUAS 2025: 14–17 May 2025, CHARLOTTE, NC ICRA 2025: 19–23 May 2025, ATLANTA, GA London Humanoids Summit: 29–30 May 2025, LONDON IEEE RCAR 2025: 1–6 June 2025, TOYAMA, JAPAN 2025 Energy Drone & Robotics Summit: 16–18 June 2025, HOUSTON, TX RSS 2025: 21–25 June 2025, LOS ANGELES ETH Robotics Summer School: 21–27 June 2025, GENEVA IAS 2025: 30 June–4 July 2025, GENOA, ITALY ICRES 2025: 3–4 July 2025, PORTO, PORTUGAL IEEE World Haptics: 8–11 July 2025, SUWON, KOREA IFAC Symposium on Robotics: 15–18 July 2025, PARIS RoboCup 2025: 15–21 July 2025, BAHIA, BRAZIL RO-MAN 2025: 25–29 August 2025, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS Enjoy today’s videos! This robot can walk, without electronics, and only with the addition of a cartridge of compressed gas, right off the 3D-printer. It can also be printed in one go, from one material. Researchers from the University of California San Diego and BASF, describe how they developed the robot in an advanced online publication in the journal Advanced Intelligent Systems. They used the simplest technology available: a desktop 3D-printer and an off-the-shelf printing material. This design approach is not only robust, it is also cheap—each robot costs about $20 to manufacture. And details! [ Paper ] via [ University of California San Diego ] Why do you want a humanoid robot to walk like a human? So that it doesn’t look weird, I guess, but it’s hard to imagine that a system that doesn’t have the same arrangement of joints and muscles that we do will move optimally by just trying to mimic us. [ Figure ] I don’t know how it manages it, but this little soft robotic worm somehow moves with an incredible amount of personality. Soft actuators are critical for enabling soft robots, medical devices, and haptic systems. Many soft actuators, however, require power to hold a configuration and rely on hard circuitry for control, limiting their potential applications. In this work, the first soft electromagnetic system is demonstrated for externally-controlled bistable actuation or self-regulated astable oscillation. [ Paper ] via [ Georgia Tech ] Thanks, Ellen! A 180-degree pelvis rotation would put the “break” in “breakdancing” if this were a human doing it. [ Boston Dynamics ] My colleagues were impressed by this cooking robot, but that may be because journalists are always impressed by free food. [ Posha ] This is our latest work about a hybrid aerial-terrestrial quadruped robot called SPIDAR, which shows unique and complex locomotion styles in both aerial and terrestrial domains including thrust-assisted crawling motion. This work has been presented in the International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR) 2024. [ Paper ] via [ Dragon Lab ] Thanks, Moju! This fresh, newly captured video from Unitree’s testing grounds showcases the breakneck speed of humanoid intelligence advancement. Every day brings something thrilling! [ Unitree ] There should be more robots that you can ride around on. [ AgileX Robotics ] There should be more robots that wear hats at work. [ Ugo ] iRobot, who pioneered giant docks for robot vacuums, is now moving away from giant docks for robot vacuums. [ iRobot ] There’s a famous experiment where if you put a dead fish in current, it starts swimming, just because of its biomechanical design. Somehow, you can do the same thing with an unactuated quadruped robot on a treadmill. [ Delft University of Technology ] Mush! Narrowly! [ Hybrid Robotics ] It’s freaking me out a little bit that this couple is apparently wandering around a huge mall that is populated only by robots and zero other humans. [ MagicLab ] I’m trying, I really am, but the yellow is just not working for me. [ Kepler ] By having Stretch take on the physically demanding task of unloading trailers stacked floor to ceiling with boxes, Gap Inc has reduced injuries, lowered turnover, and watched employees get excited about automation intended to keep them safe. [ Boston Dynamics ] Since arriving at Mars in 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover has been ingesting samples of Martian rock, soil, and air to better understand the past and present habitability of the Red Planet. Of particular interest to its search are organic molecules: the building blocks of life. Now, Curiosity’s onboard chemistry lab has detected long-chain hydrocarbons in a mudstone called “Cumberland,” the largest organics yet discovered on Mars. [ NASA ] This University of Toronto Robotics Institute Seminar is from Sergey Levine at UC Berkeley, on Robotics Foundation Models. General-purpose pretrained models have transformed natural language processing, computer vision, and other fields. In principle, such approaches should be ideal in robotics: since gathering large amounts of data for any given robotic platform and application is likely to be difficult, general pretrained models that provide broad capabilities present an ideal recipe to enable robotic learning at scale for real-world applications. From the perspective of general AI research, such approaches also offer a promising and intriguing approach to some of the grandest AI challenges: if large-scale training on embodied experience can provide diverse physical capabilities, this would shed light not only on the practical questions around designing broadly capable robots, but the foundations of situated problem-solving, physical understanding, and decision making. However, realizing this potential requires handling a number of challenging obstacles. What data shall we use to train robotic foundation models? What will be the training objective? How should alignment or post-training be done? In this talk, I will discuss how we can approach some of these challenges. [ University of Toronto ]

March 28, 2025.