Imagine you’re enjoying a picnic by a riverbank on a windy day. A gust of wind accidentally catches your paper napkin and lands on the water’s surface, quickly drifting away…

Since the term “soft robotics” was adopted in 2008, engineers in the field have been building diverse representations of flexible machines useful in exploration, locomotion, rehabilitation, and even space. One…

When MIT’s mini cheetah perfectly executed a backflip on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” the audience screamed and applauded wildly. If this machine — which also pranced around the…

MIT scientists have developed tiny, soft-bodied robots that can be controlled with a weak magnet. The robots, formed from rubbery magnetic spirals, can be programmed to walk, crawl, swim —…

Walking to a friend’s house or browsing the aisles of a grocery store might feel like simple tasks, but they in fact require sophisticated capabilities. That's because humans are able…

Your brand new household robot is delivered to your house, and you ask it to make you a cup of coffee. Although it knows some basic skills from previous practice…

Imagine purchasing a robot to perform household tasks. This robot was built and trained in a factory on a certain set of tasks and has never seen the items in…

Researchers from MIT and Stanford University have devised a new machine-learning approach that could be used to control a robot, such as a drone or autonomous vehicle, more effectively and…

Imagine you want to carry a large, heavy box up a flight of stairs. You might spread your fingers out and lift that box with both hands, then hold it…

“As a child, I wished for a robot that would explain others’ emotions to me” says Sharifa Alghowinem, a research scientist in the Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group (PRG). Growing…