A few hundred robots moved a buildng complex covering about 43,400 square feet. Shanghai is no stranger to jaw-dropping feats of engineering. In the latest example, a Shanghai historic building moved by robots is capturing global attention. The relocation of the complex in Huayang, a Shikumen-style building weighing about 7,500 metric tons (approximately 8,267 U.S. tons) and covering roughly 43,400 square feet, is truly rewriting the rules. This ambitious project is powered by an army of 432 small robots that are moving the massive structure about 33 feet each day to make way for a new underground development.

Scientists and roboticists have long looked at nature for inspiration to develop new features for machines. In this case, researchers from the University of Toronto were inspired by bats and other animals that rely on echolocation to design a method that would give small robots that ability to navigate themselves -- one that doesn't need expensive hardware or components too large or too heavy for tiny machines. In fact, according to PopSci, the team only used the integrated audio hardware of an interactive puck robot and built an audio extension deck using cheap mic and speakers for a tiny flying drone that can fit in the palm of your hand. The system works just like bat echolocation. It was designed to emit sounds across frequencies, which a robot's microphone then picks up as they bounce off walls.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science and the University of California, Berkeley, have designed a robotic system that enables a low-cost and relatively small legged robot to climb and descend stairs nearly its height; traverse rocky, slippery, uneven, steep and varied terrain; walk across gaps; scale rocks and curbs; and even operate in the dark. "Empowering small robots to climb stairs and handle a variety of environments is crucial to developing robots that will be useful in people's homes as well as search-and-rescue operations," said Deepak Pathak, an assistant professor in the Robotics Institute. "This system creates a robust and adaptable robot that could perform many everyday tasks." The team put the robot through its paces, testing it on uneven stairs and hillsides at public parks, challenging it to walk across stepping stones and over slippery surfaces, and asking it to climb stairs that for its height would be akin to a human leaping over a hurdle. The researchers trained the robot with 4,000 clones of it in a simulator, where they practiced walking and climbing on challenging terrain.

A small robot with wings like an insect can fly and generate more power than a similarly sized animal in nature. Most flying robots, whether they use wings or propellers, have motors and gears and transmission systems to connect the components, but these can weigh the robot down and fail. Now, Tim Helps at the University of Bristol, UK, and his colleagues have designed a small robot that uses an electric field – and a droplet of oil that increases the strength of the field – to flap the wings directly, avoiding the need for a motor or a transmission system. Helps and his team tested the mechanism for a million wing flaps and found it had a steady power output that was slightly better than that of an insect muscle of the same weight. "I'm always very excited when we can achieve a better-than-nature power density," says Helps. "It's a rare thing because nature does an amazing job."

A team of engineers at California State University, Northridge are developing swarms of tiny, insect-sized robots that could help make exploring other planets safer and more efficient. Led by mechanical engineering professor Nhut Ho, the team was just awarded a $538,000 grant from the US Department of Defense to further develop their miniature robotic space explorers. The longterm goal is to create autonomous swarms of small robots that can move across the surface of other planets to collect samples and complete tasks that might otherwise be too complicated for a rover, or too risky for a human astronaut. 'We were inspired by the behaviors that we see in swarms of ants and bees that self-organize, create clever solutions for different tasks, work in groups of different sizes and have the ability to complete the tasks even when members fail,' Ho told CSU Northridge's news blog. Ho's team will collaborate on the project with another group from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which recently won a DARPA competition for autonomous robots completing reconnaissance and search and rescue operations in a simulated disaster area.

Salmon seem to prefer small robots to larger ones, which could help guide how we automate fish farms. Monitoring of commercial fish farms is normally done by a human diver, but that can be disruptive for the animals, so Maarja Kruusmaa at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and her colleagues wanted to see if a robot could do the job without unsettling the fish as much. The researchers conducted a test in a sea cage in Norway containing 188,000 salmon. They filmed the salmon using a diver, a commercial underwater robot called the Argus Mini that propels itself with thrusters, and a smaller underwater robot called U-CAT, which uses flippers to swim. They used the footage to measure how close the salmon got to the diver or robots and how fast they beat their tails, indicators of how much the fish were disrupted.

To conserve power, the chips use a hybrid digital-analog time-domain processor in which the pulse-width of signals encodes information. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology demonstrated robotic cars driven by the unique ASICs at the 2019 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). The research was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) through the Center for Brain-inspired Computing Enabling Autonomous Intelligence (CBRIC). "We are trying to bring intelligence to these very small robots so they can learn about their environment and move around autonomously, without infrastructure," said Arijit Raychowdhury, associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "To accomplish that, we want to bring low-power circuit concepts to these very small devices so they can make decisions on their own. There is a huge demand for very small, but capable robots that do not require infrastructure."

What happens when a serial entrepreneur with a Master's degree in robotics goes out looking for a problem to solve? For InVia Robotics founder and CEO Lior Elazary, it leads to a new army of self-learning, self-guided warehouse robots. Elazary had already helped found web hosting company HostPro Inc., and Edgecast Networks Inc., a content delivery network. Then he set out to apply the lessons from his graduate study and decided at first to focus on home robotics. "I thought there might be an opportunity in in-home elderly care," he said.

Many of us grew up watching the incredible potential of robots in movies and television. Robots showed us the brightest of the future. However, we haven't really seen the true potential of robotic technology being unleashed. While the popular TV cartoon show, Jetsons from the 60's showed us the infinite possibilities of humans and robots co-existing, movies like the Terminator or Wall-E scared us by showing the prospective dark side of Artificial Intelligence and technology. But the age where robots finally coexist with human beings is not really far.

The following is an excerpt from Soonish by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. Thanks to recent advances in robotics, computing, and other technologies, a small but growing number of scientists and engineers think robot-made housing might finally be possible. In fact, not only is it possible, it may be far better. Robotic construction may increase the speed of construction, improve its quality, and lower its price. There are a number of ways this could work, including giant gantries that behave something like 3D printers, and robotic arms on wheels that might directly replace construction workers.