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These include rugged small vehicles with tracks, cameras and sensors that can search inside rubble and climb over obstacles. Teledyne FLIR, a sensing technology specialist based in Oregon in the United States, used robots like these in June 2021 when a tower block partially collapsed in the Miami suburb of Surfside in Florida.

In Japan, university teams are developing another type of search and rescue robot – a hose-like robot with a video camera called the Active Scope Camera that can search inside collapsed buildings. Drones also help search and rescue teams see disaster sites from above.

Sewers are another setting where robots are helping humans tackle tough jobs.

The new amphibious drone has a light design and weighs just 1.63 kilograms.

China’s researchers have unveiled the creation of a one-of-a-kind “aerial-aquatic hybrid drone” capable of performing a wide range of tasks. Named TJ-FlyingFish, it is a hybrid drone that can both fly and dive underwater.

This remarkable drone has the potential to be a game-changing tool in various sectors of life. As per the developers, it could include assisting with offshore construction, monitoring marine habitat, conducting aerial and aquatic surveys, remote sensing, and search-and-rescue operations, among other things.

Researchers have engineered a robotic lionfish with synthetic arteries, similar to those found in a human’s circulatory system. The fish “blood” that runs through it serves as both the robot’s power source and controls its movement. The findings, published Wednesday in Nature, may propel the new wave of soft robots, in which inventors seek to improve lifelike automated machines for human connection.


It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s… sort of both, actually. And its designers think animals won’t notice the difference.

In a series of quadrotor closed-loop control experiments, the drones underwent range tests, stress tests, target rotation and occlusion, hiking with adversaries, triangular loops between objects, and dynamic target tracking. They tracked moving targets, and executed multi-step loops between objects in never-before-seen environments, surpassing performance of other cutting-edge counterparts.

The team believes that the ability to learn from limited expert data and understand a given task while generalizing to new environments could make autonomous drone deployment more efficient, cost-effective, and reliable. Liquid neural networks, they noted, could enable autonomous air mobility drones to be used for environmental monitoring, package delivery, autonomous vehicles, and robotic assistants.

“The experimental setup presented in our work tests the reasoning capabilities of various deep learning systems in controlled and straightforward scenarios,” says MIT CSAIL Research Affiliate Ramin Hasani. “There is still so much room left for future research and development on more complex reasoning challenges for AI systems in autonomous navigation applications, which has to be tested before we can safely deploy them in our society.”

As per the company, traditional rovers may not be able to traverse everywhere and perform tasks like their drone-like hopper.

For decades, Earth’s natural satellite has been one of the most popular destinations for space exploration. The upcoming Artemis missions, along with the excitement on establishing a human settlement on the Moon, have collectively boosted the lunar economy market substantially in recent years.

Several startups have been preparing to offer their technological solutions to gain a better understanding of the valuable resources available and provide services to future astronauts.

“First of all, the environment has changed, and the need for more resilient energy transport methods for military operations is at a premium,” explained Col. Paul “Promo” Calhoun to Popular Mechanics in an exclusive interview. American forces operate globally like the special operations units he resupplied as a C-17 cargo pilot, from outposts in the South China Sea to the Iraqi desert. Since there is no simple way to power them, many forces use their radars, anti-drone microwave weapons, lasers, or other energy-intensive equipment. And with each passing year, the severity of the issue increases.