Our July issue of Tech Briefs highlighted a fleet of “roboats” that could someday transport people, collect trash, and self-assemble into floating structures. The Roboat autonomous robotic boats — rectangular hulls equipped with sensors, thrusters, microcontrollers, GPS modules, cameras, and other hardware —...

Today’s robots can accomplish many repetitive tasks, but their inability to understand the nuances of human language makes them mostly useless for more complicated requests. For example, if a specific tool is placed in a toolbox and a robot is asked to “pick it up,” it would be...

As smart as the Curiosity rover has been about landing and finding its own way on a distant world, the rover is pretty brainless when it comes to doing the science that it was sent 567 million kilometers to carry out. That has to change if future rover missions are to make discoveries...

Defying 30 mph gusts and temperatures down to -22 °F, NASA’s new polar rover recently demonstrated that it could operate completely autonomously in one of Earth’s harshest environments.

Waves apply significant forces to small boats, in particular when such vessels are moving at a high speed in severe sea conditions. In addition, small high-speed boats run the risk of diving with the bow into the next wave crest during operations in the wavelengths and wave speeds...

Propulsion by a novel jet engine is the innovation behind a University of Colorado Boulder-developed aircraft that’s accelerating toward commercialization. Jet engine technology can be small, fuel-efficient, and cost-effective, at least with Assistant Professor Ryan...

This week's Question: The Curiosity rover, NASA's biggest extraterrestrial explorer, was launched toward Mars last week. The mobile laboratory, 10 feet long by 9 feet wide, will search for evidence that the planet was...