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self healing material could be a breakthrough for humanoid robots Researchers at US university Carnegie Mellon have created a new electrically conductive material that can repair itself, presenting new opportunities for soft  robotics  and  wearable technology . Combining properties of metal and plastic, the supple, stretchy material can be used to make circuits that stay operational even after sustaining physical damage. The discovery opens up the possibility that robots may one day have sensor-laden skin that can repair itself like a human's, or that we could sport ultra-thin wearable devices on our bodies for long periods of time without them degrading. The material developed by Carnegie Mellon researchers stays operational even after sustaining physical damage "This could have important applications in areas like wearable computing, where you want circuits you can incorporate into textiles or place on your skin, and just like natural skin if y...

NVIDIA wants to power intelligent robots with Jetson Xavier NVIDIA is hoping to play a bigger role in the future of robotics with its Isaac platform, powered by the new Jetson Xavier system-on-a-chip. If that name sounds familiar, it's because it's relying on the same the processor from the  Xavier Drive self-driving SOC . The Xavier is over 20 times faster than the existing  Jetson TX2 platform , NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed at Computex today. While that last SoC was useful for products like delivery robots and drones, Huang is calling the Xavier the "world's first computer for intelligent robots." Under the hood, Jetson Xavier has six different processors: An octa-core Arm CPU; a Volta Tensor Core GPU; two NVDLA deep learning chips, as well as vision, video and image processors. Xavier is capable of 30 trillion operations per second, and it sports over 9 billion transistors. Just like with self-driving cars, all of that horsepower will help ...

New Robot Swims With No Motor and No Battery Caltech researchers have successfully engineered mini robots that can propel themselves and navigate their way through water using their own bodies' reactions to different temperatures. The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) announced in a  paper  published in the   Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  this week that its engineers in collaboration with ETH Zurich have successfully developed robots that can swim without a motor or even a power supply. These first-of-their-kind aquatic robots use self-propulsion to navigate through the water. The philosophy behind the devices is rather simply albeit ingenious. The aquatic machines are made from the material that deforms with temperature changes, shrinking and expanding to propel these mini robots through the water as if they were swimming. "Our examples show that we can use structured materials that deform in response to enviro...

Meet the hydrogen-powered car trying to take on Tesla ·         Riversimple has developed a hydrogen-powered car that it hopes will be a viable alternative to electric vehicles. ·         The car, called Rasa, runs on 1.5 kilograms of hydrogen and can go 300 miles. ·         Riversimple is currently producing a handful of cars with the aim of having mass production by 2020. While automakers are fixated on developing the next generation of electric cars, one British firm has other ideas. Riversimple is hoping that its hydrogen-powered two-seater car, which has a futuristic design crossed with retro traits, might be able to offer a viable alternative to electric vehicles. The Wales-based company has created a car called Rasa. It says it runs on 1.5 kilograms of hydrogen and can go 300 miles. The vehicle's engineering is very different to other cars on the market...

Morocco to switch on first phase of world's largest solar plant Desert complex will provide electricity for more than 1 million people when complete, helping African country to supply most of its energy from renewables by 2030 Morocco’s king will switch on the first phase of a concentrated solar power plant on Thursday that will become the world’s largest when completed. The power station on the edge of the Saharan desert will be the size of the country’s capital city by the time it is finished in 2018, and provide electricity for 1.1 million people. After it is switched on, the plant will initially provide 650,000 local people with solar electricity from dawn until three hours after sunset.  “It is a very, very significant project in  Africa ,” said Mafalda Duarte, the manager of Climate Investment Funds (CIF), which provided $435m (£300m) of the $9bn project’s funding. “Morocco is showing real leadership and bringing the cost of the technology down in...

New Bosch tech makes diesel engines far less polluting German engineering firm Bosch has developed technology that uses currently available hardware to drastically bring down nitrous oxide (NOx) emission in diesel cars. The sales of diesel cars have tumbled in the recent months as regulators aim to lower the output of NOx; the gas is harmful to humans and is associated with respiratory problems in urban environments. Bosch claims that it has developed a solution that not only reduces NOx output in diesel engines but practically eliminates it so it falls to a point that’s almost a tenth of the next-generation limits. “We call our system active thermal management because it keeps the most important part of the diesel exhaust, the exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) system, running at its optimal temperature,” Bosch diesel division development boss Michael Krüger told our sister publication Autocar UK. EGRs work best when they are heated by waste gases to more than 200degC, but Krü...

The Countries With The Highest Density Of Industrial Robots  Across the world, the pace of industrial automation is steadily accelerating. According to  the International Federation of Robotics , there were 66 installed industrial robots per 10,000 employees globally in 2015 and that increased to 74 in 2016. Broken down by region, average robot density in Europe is 99 units per 10,000 workers, while's it's 84 in the Americas and 63 in Asia. Even though China has recorded the most dynamic development of robot density in recent years, South Korea has the highest level of density of any country on the planet. In 2016, South Korea had 631 industrial robots per 10,000 employees and that's primarily due to the continued installation of high volume robots in the electronics and manufacturing sectors. Singapore comes second with 488 robots per 10,000 employees, 90 percent of which are installed in its electronics industry. In Germany and Japan, two countries renowned for th...