Artificial fingertip that 'feels' wins international robotics competition

Phys.org:  An open-source 3D-printed fingertip that can 'feel' in a similar way to the human sense of touch has won an international Soft Robotics competition for its contribution to soft robotics research.

Pushing the boundaries of soft robotics, the open-source tactile fingertip, known as TacTip, is a 3D-printed tactile sensor that has been developed by the Tactile Robotics Team from Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL).

The fingertip meets the need for a cheap, robust, versatile tactile sensor to give robots an artificial sense of touch. The sensor has a unique design in which a webcam is mounted inside a 3D-printed soft fingertip to track internal pins that act like touch receptors inside our own fingertips, making it cheap to build and highly customisable.  Cont'd...

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Boston Dynamics Webinar - Why Humanoids Are the Future of Manufacturing

Boston Dynamics Webinar - Why Humanoids Are the Future of Manufacturing

Join us October 28th for this Webinar as we reflect on what we've learned by observing factory floors, and why we've grown convinced that chasing generalization in manipulation—both in hardware and behavior—isn't just interesting, but necessary. We'll discuss AI research threads we're exploring at Boston Dynamics to push this mission forward, and highlight opportunities our field should collectively invest more in to turn the humanoid vision, and the reinvention of manufacturing, into a practical, economically viable product.