Raffaello D’Andrea, in a robot lab at TEDGlobal, demos his flying quadcopters: robots that think like athletes, solving physical problems with algorithms that help them learn. In a series of nifty demos, D’Andrea show drones that play catch, balance and make decisions together — and watch out for an I-want-this-now demo of Kinect-controlled quads.

Baxter is a robot meant to work with people in small manufacturing facilities. Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services—are largely [...]

Is Dominos pizza-delivering drone just a publicity stunt, or a tantalizing look at the future of food delivery? The eight-bladed DomiCopter may be a little impractical given it needs a skilled pilot, but eventually autonomous drones will be capable of delivering a piping hot pizza in mere minutes since they’re able to avoid traffic, stop lights, [...]

Futurist Thomas Frey: In September 1989, GE Chairman Jack Welch flew to Bangalore, India for a breakfast meeting with an Indian delegation that included Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi. The purpose of his trip was to sell airplane engines and medical equipment to India, but the meeting took an interesting twist along the way.    

Researchers are building systems to enable humans to collaborate with robots and vehicles. In the morning, you wake up and your robot starts the coffee maker and then sends the daily calendar to the car. The car then works on a plan that makes sure you keep to that schedule. This is the vision of [...]

The unmanned aircraft are the next big transformation in the aviation industry. The phrase “this is your captain speaking” may soon become a thing of the past, thanks to a new generation of robotic, passenger aircraft that will take to the skies by themselves.    

A robot the size of a fly that is able to perform the agile maneuvers of the ubiquitous insects has been created bu scientists in the United States. This “robo-fly”, built from carbon fiber, weighs a fraction of a gram and has super-fast electronic “muscles” to power its wings.    

Urban architecture could take on a much different form as scientists make huge strides in robotics, natural building materials, and new construction methods. Cities are complex ecosystems and they are confronting tremendous pressures to seek optimum efficiency with minimal impact in a resource-constrained world. While architecture, urban planning, and sustainability attempt to address the massive [...]

COMAN Mimicking the many distinct balancing adjustments standing humans make when unexpectedly shoved, or while encountering shifting terrain (such as on a boat or moving train) is a skill that most robots haven’t mastered. Nevertheless, one lab in Italy has created a humanoid robot that comes very close to matching our skill at avoiding taking [...]

The arguments in favor of self-driving cars are many: computer-sorted traffic could yield higher maximum speeds and optimized drive times (sayonara “stop and go,” hello increased fuel efficiency!), the option to drive whether you’ve had too much to drink or not and driverless valet park anywhere you go (as well as make better use of [...]