In an era obsessed with bigger batteries and tighter control loops, a soft strip that moves itself with nothing but a warm surface or a shaft of sunlight reads like a provocation and a promise all at once. That is the proposition behind ambient-heat soft actuators—materials that convert tiny,
Benjamin Daigle sits down with Oscar Vail, a technology expert whose work spans soft robotics, materials science, and electrochemical systems. In this conversation, Oscar unpacks how a manta ray–inspired robot uses the same magnetic fields to both swim and stabilize its flexible Zn–MnO₂ batteries,
When 1,571 young innovators from 91 countries gather to build robots that think for themselves the future of autonomy looks less distant and more doable, and the setting in Singapore turns that momentum into a living lab where prototypes meet practical constraints. The scene signals a shift: youth
Everyday robots stumble not on strength or speed but on the simple chaos of new kitchens, offices, and factories where objects move, lighting shifts, and assumptions crumble between one task and the next. That predictable failure under domain shift has long slowed service and humanoid robots, even
An industry racing to make machines walk, grasp, and reason like people now faces a paradox of plenty, with capital, policy tailwinds, and supply chains generating scale faster than customers can absorb and deploy solutions at a sustainable pace across real workplaces and public services in ways
Airports across the world quietly lose time, fuel, and goodwill whenever a parked jet waits for ground power while crews juggle tight schedules, heavy cables, and unpredictable apron conditions under mounting operational pressure. The delay is small in isolation yet compounding in effect: every
