Meghan Daley is a NASA project manager who leads teams to develop and integrate simulations for robotic operations to prepare astronauts on the ISS and beyond. We'll be spotlighting five honorees each week throughout October

This article is part of our reviews of AI research papers, a series of posts that explore the latest findings in artificial intelligence. The human hand is one of the fascinating creations of nature, and one of the highly sought goals of artificial intelligence and robotics researchers. A robotic hand that could manipulate objects as we do would be enormously useful in factories, warehouses, offices, and homes. Yet despite tremendous progress in the field, research on robotics hands remains extremely expensive and limited to a few very wealthy companies and research labs. Now, new research promises to make robotics research available to resource-constrained organizations.

On a summer night in Dallas in 2016, a bomb-handling robot made technological history. Police officers had attached roughly a pound of C-4 explosive to it, steered the device up to a wall near an active shooter and detonated the charge. In the explosion, the assailant, Micah Xavier Johnson, became the first person in the United States to be killed by a police robot. Afterward, then-Dallas Police Chief David Brown called the decision sound. Before the robot attacked, Mr. Johnson had shot five officers dead, wounded nine others and hit two civilians, and negotiations had stalled.

On a summer night in Dallas in 2016, a bomb-handling robot made technological history. Police officers had attached roughly a pound of C-4 explosive to it, steered the device up to a wall near an active shooter and detonated the charge. In the explosion, the assailant, Micah Xavier Johnson, became the first person in the United States to be killed by a police robot. Afterward, then-Dallas Police Chief David Brown called the decision sound. Before the robot attacked, Mr. Johnson had shot five officers dead, wounded nine others and hit two civilians, and negotiations had stalled.

Conferences and trade shows, held in interesting locations around the world, can be entertaining, informative and an opportunity to explore new places, meet new people and renew acquaintances. Three recent examples: Xponential, the mostly defense-related unmanned land, sea and air show, held in Dallas; Innorobo, focused on service robotics, in Paris; and ICRA, the IEEE's premier robotics conference, in Singapore. The 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the IEEE's principle forum for robotics researchers to present their work, was held this year at the Marina Bay Sands Hotel and Convention Center in Singapore. ICRA continues to have the highest number of cited research papers in the robotics field of all the various global conferences (including IROS). In an IEEE/Spectrum review of that portion of the conference that was biomedical-related, a swallowable capsule robot capable of needle aspiration, guided by magnets, and an autonomous snake-like colonoscopy robot were two of the hits. Another reviewer found the rehab exoskeletons, haptic interfaces, modular robot components and many of the ROS-enabled solutions of merit.

A tiny robot sits beside the laptop, looking like one of those anthropomorphic automobiles that show up in Pixar's Cars movies. Almost instantly, it wakes up, rolls down the table, and counts to four. This is Cozmo--an artificially intelligent toy robot unveiled late last month by San Francisco startup Anki--and Tappeiner, one of the company's founders, is programming the little automaton to do new things. The programs are simple--he also teaches Cozmo to stack blocks--but they're supposed to be simple. Tappeiner is using Anki's newly unveiled software development kit--an SDK, in coder parlance--that he says even the greenest of coders can use to tweak the behavior of the toy robot.

Our Watch-Bot watches what a human is currently doing, and uses our unsupervised learning model to detect the human's forgotten actions. Once a forgotten action detected (put-milk-backto-fridge in the example), it points out the related object (milk in the example) by the laser spot in the current scene. Andrew Dalton in Engadget called it "a sort of robo-sentry." Watch-Bot is designed to keep an eye on tasks in the home or office and remind you if one of those tasks is still not done--not with a beep, not with a soothing companion-like voice, but with a laser pointer to nab the object still needing attention. Evan Ackerman in IEEE Spectrum said Watch-Bot can independently learn your household activity patterns in order to come up with its unfinished task reminders. Core components of Watch-Bot are a 3D sensor (a Kinect, in this case), a camera that can pan and tilt, a laptop, and laser pointer, said IEEE Spectrum.

The thousands of bright orange automatons that haul shelves full of merchandise at Amazon's fulfillment center here could be seen as a sign of the impending doom of the human workforce. But the 500 or so full-time workers employed at this site have something robots won't have for many years, according to experts. Humans have an intuitive understanding of the movement of objects, and fine motor skills that give them a firm hold on key warehouse operations like packaging and stowing goods. That helps explain why Amazon.com, The company has 30,000 robots -- but more than 230,000 employees, not counting the temporary staff it hires during the peak holiday period.

We present ReAct!, an interactive tool for high-level reasoning for cognitive robotic applications. ReAct! enables robotic researchers to describe robots' actions and change in dynamic domains, without having to know about the syntactic and semantic details of the underlying formalism in advance, and solve planning problems using state-of-the-art automated reasoners, without having to learn about their input/output language or usage. In particular, ReAct! can be used to represent sophisticated dynamic domains that feature concurrency, indirect effects of actions, and state/transition constraints. It allows for embedding externally defined calculations (e.g., checking for collision-free continuous trajectories) into representations of hybrid domains that require a tight integration of (discrete) high-level reasoning with (continuous) geometric reasoning. ReAct! also enables users to solve planning problems that involve complex goals. Such variety of utilities are useful for robotic researchers to work on interesting and challenging domains, ranging from service robotics to cognitive factories. ReAct! provides sample formalizations of some action domains (e.g., multi-agent path planning, Tower of Hanoi), as well as dynamic simulations of plans computed by a state-of-the-art automated reasoner (e.g., a SAT solver or an ASP solver).