As far as harsh proving grounds for autonomy go, Switzerland sets the bar high. A mountainous nation, many Swiss highways and other intercity roads pass through tunnels that blot out GNSS signals and create cramped, traffic-congested spaces that are deeply...

Decommissioning nuclear power plants is an immense task. The estimate for the Sellafield facility in Cumbria is £136 billion over more than a century. During the last 14 years, Barry Lennox, professor of applied control at the University of Manchester...

A robot can cover diverse environments as adeptly as animals by changing form on the fly. The GOAT (Good Over All Terrains) developed at the CREATE lab at EPFL in Switzerland can spontaneously morph between a flat ‘rover’ shape and a sphere...

Vaisala Xweather and NIRA Dynamics have developed a dataset that combines weather forecasting and computer vision with real-time data. The integration draws on data from NIRA Dynamics from billions of data points gathered from connected vehicles...

Underwater vehicles have to manage a complex environment of currents, fighting against many flows as they attempt to stay on course. Peter Gunnarson and John Dabiri at the California Institute of Technology have designed an underwater robot...

Tests in Japan have shown successful data connection with an autonomous high altitude platform station (HAPS) flying at an altitude of 20km for the first time. The trial with Space Compass and NTT DOCOMO connected a 4G LTE base station on the ground with the HAPS...

WaveAerospace has constructed a heavy-lift multirotor capable of high-speed, long-endurance flight in very harsh conditions, including in obstacle-laden and GNSS-denied environments at night and in zero visibility.
The company has been in active R&D...

Researchers in Florida have developed a hybrid system that combines uncrewed underwater, sea and air vehicles to monitor ice in the Arctic.
Direct observation of the ice is challenging as satellite sensors have a coarse spatial resolution and cannot detect the fine fractal...

Researchers in Asia have developed a new technique with machine learning for controlling ballbots. Ballbots are versatile robotic systems with the ability to move around in all directions. This makes it tricky to control their movement...

congatec has shown its heatpipe cooling system for Computer-on-Module (COMs) for the first time. The cooling system uses acetone as a working fluid in the heat pipes instead of water to cool processors used in autonomous and conventional vehicles that are exposed...