In 2022, Randall Pietersen, a civil engineer in the U.S. Air Force, set out on a training mission to assess damage at an airfield runway, practicing “base recovery” protocol after a simulated attack. For hours, his team walked over the area in chemical protection gear, radioing in geocoordinates as they [...]

Google DeepMind has released a new model, Gemini Robotics, that combines its best large language model with robotics. Plugging in the LLM seems to give robots the ability to be more dexterous, work from natural-language commands, and generalize across tasks. All three are things that robots have struggled to do [...]

Since general AI agent Manus was launched last week, it has spread online like wildfire. And not just in China either, where it was developed by Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. It’s made  its way into the global conversation, with influential voices in tech, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Hugging [...]

Canadian robotruck startup Waabi says its super-realistic virtual simulation is now accurate enough to prove the safety of its driverless big rigs without having to run them for miles on real roads.  The company uses a digital twin of its real-world robotrucks, loaded up with real sensor data, and measures how [...]

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The concept of artificial general intelligence—an ultra-powerful AI system we don’t have yet—can be thought of as a balloon, repeatedly inflated with hype during peaks of optimism (or [...]

Imagine that a robot is helping you clean the dishes. You ask it to grab a soapy bowl out of the sink, but its gripper slightly misses the mark.Using a new framework developed by MIT and NVIDIA researchers, you could correct that robot’s behavior with simple interactions. The method would [...]

Researchers have enabled a man who is paralyzed to control a robotic arm through a device that relays signals from his brain to a computer. He was able to grasp, move and drop objects just by imagining himself performing the actions. [...]

Energy remains a significant factor in industrial production processes. High levels of energy consumption make production more expensive and exacerbate the climate crisis. A new type of robot technology needs 90% less electricity than conventional systems. The technology uses lightweight, shape memory materials to construct novel, non-pneumatic, industrial gripper systems [...]

Scientists have developed a biorobotic arm that can mirror human tremors, such as those experienced by individuals that live with Parkinson's disease. Artificial muscles on either side of the forearm contract and relax to suppress the involuntary shaking of the wrist and hand. The researchers see their biorobotic arm not [...]

For over 30 years, science photographer Felice Frankel has helped MIT professors, researchers, and students communicate their work visually. Throughout that time, she has seen the development of various tools to support the creation of compelling images: some helpful, and some antithetical to the effort of producing a trustworthy and [...]

Cutting edge technology may come with downsides. [...]

MIT Professor Markus J. Buehler has been named the recipient of the 2025 Washington Award, one of the nation’s oldest and most esteemed engineering honors. The Washington Award is conferred to “an engineer(s) whose professional attainments have preeminently advanced the welfare of humankind,” recognizing those who have made a profound impact on society through [...]