"One of the dreams I had as a kid was about the first day of school, and being able to build and be creative, and it was the happiest day of my life. And at MIT, I felt like that dream became reality," says Ballesteros. Growing up in the suburban town of Spring, Texas, just outside of Houston, Erik Ballesteros couldn't help but be drawn in by the possibilities for humans in space. It was the early 2000s, and NASA's space shuttle program was the main transport for astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Ballesteros' hometown was less than an hour from Johnson Space Center (JSC), where NASA's mission control center and astronaut training facility are based.

This paper presents a scheme to enhance payload manipulation using a robot collaborating with an overhead crane. In the current industrial practice, when the crane's payload has to be accurately manipulated and located in a desired position, the task becomes laborious and risky since the operators have to guide the fine motions of the payload by hand. In the proposed collaborative scheme, the crane lifts the payload while the robot's end-effector guides it toward the desired position. The only link between the robot and the crane is the interaction force produced during the guiding of the payload. Two admittance transfer functions are considered to accomplish harmless and smooth contact with the payload. The first is used in a position-based admittance control integrated with the robot. The second one adds compliance to the crane by processing the interaction force through the admittance transfer function to generate a crane's velocity command that makes the crane follow the payload. Then the robot's end-effector and the crane move collaboratively to guide the payload to the desired location. A method is presented to design the admittance controllers that accomplish a fluent robot-crane collaboration. Simulations and experiments validating the scheme potential are shown.

It's hard not to laugh at NASA's blooper reel of astronauts falling and bouncing in slow motion on the moon. But coping with inertia where gravity is one-sixth that of Earth is no laughing matter when you're wearing a constricting space suit and need to finish an exhausting task. So mechanical engineering professor Harry Asada (center) and colleagues are developing wearable robotic limbs to help astronauts get back on their feet after a fall. Based on the "SuperLimbs" Asada designed to assist construction workers and ship builders, the limbs extend from a backpack that would also contain the astronaut's life support system along with a controller and motors to provide power. As part of NASA's planned Artemis mission, astronauts will be expected to build the first permanent moon base--a physically demanding project with a high risk of falls during multiple extended extravehicular activities (EVAs).

A future in which androids look and feel so much like humans that they start to believe they are actually alive - as depicted in the film Blade Runner - may soon be reality. Scientists in Japan have invented a robot that can'feel' pain and is programmed to visibly wince when an electric charge is applied to its synthetic skin. The team from Osaka University is hoping that coding pain sensors into machines will help them develop empathy to human suffering, so they can act as more compassionate companions. For lead researcher Prof Minoru Asada, who is also President of the Robotics Society of Japan, the question of whether robots could one day seem human is almost irrelevant. "In Japan we believe all inanimate objects have a soul, so a metal robot is no different from a human in that respect, there are less boundaries between humans and objects," he said.

In today's factories and warehouses, it's not uncommon to see robots whizzing about, shuttling items or tools from one station to another. For the most part, robots navigate pretty easily across open layouts. But they have a much harder time winding through narrow spaces to carry out tasks such as reaching for a product at the back of a cluttered shelf, or snaking around a car's engine parts to unscrew an oil cap. Now MIT engineers have developed a robot designed to extend a chain-like appendage flexible enough to twist and turn in any necessary configuration, yet rigid enough to support heavy loads or apply torque to assemble parts in tight spaces. When the task is complete, the robot can retract the appendage and extend it again, at a different length and shape, to suit the next task.

In today's factories and warehouses, it's not uncommon to see robots whizzing about, shuttling items or tools from one station to another. For the most part, robots navigate pretty easily across open layouts. But they have a much harder time winding through narrow spaces to carry out tasks such as reaching for a product at the back of a cluttered shelf, or snaking around a car's engine parts to unscrew an oil cap. Now MIT engineers have developed a robot designed to extend a chain-like appendage flexible enough to twist and turn in any necessary configuration, yet rigid enough to support heavy loads or apply torque to assemble parts in tight spaces. When the task is complete, the robot can retract the appendage and extend it again, at a different length and shape, to suit the next task.

This article describes a milestone in our research efforts toward the real robot competition in RoboCup. We participated in the middle-size league at RoboCup-97, held in conjunction with the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Nagoya, Japan. Reinforcement learning has recently been receiving increased attention as a method for robot learning with little or no a priori knowledge and a higher capability for reactive and adaptive behaviors (Connel and Mahadevan 1993). In the reinforcement learning scheme, a robot and an environment are modeled by two synchronized finite-state automatons interacting in discrete-time cyclical processes. The robot senses the current state of the environment and selects an action.

RoboCup is an initiative designed to promote the full integration of AI and robotics research. Following the success of the first RoboCup in 1997 at Nagoya (Kitano 1998; Noda et al. 1998) and the second RoboCup in Paris in 1998 (Asada et al. 2000; Asada and Kitano 1999), the Third Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences, RoboCup-99, were held in Stockholm from 27 July to 4 August 1999 in conjunction with the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-99). There were four different leagues: (1) the simulation league, (2) the smallsize real robot league, (3) the middle-size real robot league, and (4) the Sony legged robot league. RoboCup-2000, the Fourth Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences, will take place in Melbourne, Australia, in August 2000. It was organized by Linköping University with the cooperation of Stockholm University, and it was sponsored by Sony Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Futurniture, First Hotel, The Foundation for Knowledge and Competence Development, The Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research, The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, the Swedish National Board for Industrial and Technical Development, and the Wallenberg Laboratory for Research on Information Technology and Autonomous Systems.

Many robotic designs take nature as their muse: sticking to walls like geckos, swimming through water like tuna, sprinting across terrain like cheetahs. Such designs borrow properties from nature, using engineered materials and hardware to mimic animals' behavior. Now, scientists at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania are taking more than inspiration from nature -- they're taking ingredients. The group has genetically engineered muscle cells to flex in response to light, and is using the light-sensitive tissue to build highly articulated robots. This "bio-integrated" approach, as they call it, may one day enable robotic animals that move with the strength and flexibility of their living counterparts.

Japanese engineers have created yet another robot baby, because, you know, you can't have enough of a good thing. Affetto is a tabletop baby head that's cute enough to be in the next Chucky film. Scientists seem to have an insatiable desire to study baby development not by studying real babies, but by building robot babies. Designed to look like a 1- or 2-year-old child (minus the body), Affetto has realistic facial expressions and is meant to be treated as a human being by caregivers. It has lifelike eyes and can open its mouth.