Once they have mastered the skills of toddlerhood, humans are pretty good at what roboticists call "motion planning" - reaching around obstacles to precisely pick up a soft drink in a crowded fridge, or slipping their hands around a screen to connect an unseen cable. But for robots with multi-jointed arms, motion planning is a hard problem that requires time-consuming computation. Simply picking an object up in an environment that has not been pre-engineered for the robot may require ...

Surgeons removing a malignant brain tumor don't want to leave cancerous material behind. But they're also trying to protect healthy brain matter and minimise neurological harm. Once they open up a patient's skull, there's no time to send tissue samples to a pathology lab, where they are typically frozen, sliced, stained, mounted on slides and investigated under a bulky microscope, to definitively distinguish between cancerous and normal brain cells. But a handheld, miniature microscope ...

The Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) in the UK is calling for a major rethink about education and the role of schools and colleges in promoting engineering. Its latest report is calling for a major rethink about the role of schools and colleges in promoting engineering. The ‘Big Ideas: the future of engineering in schools’ report, supported by the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering, reflects the views of leading engineering education experts and key stakeholders such as ...

  Can machines think? Well, what does it mean 'to think'? Thinking about thought is a journey into philosophy. Instead Alan Turing asked a different question in 1950: can machines do what humans (who are thinking entities) do ? Earlier this month, a computer – Google’s DeepMind – beat Lee Sedol, the world champion Go player, four times in five matches. Go is disarmingly trivial to play: you alternately place pieces on a board with a 19x19 grid of lines to try and surround your ...

  Author: Derek Coulson, independent machinery safety consultant, Safe Machine Ltd and host of the majority of the Processing & Packaging Machinery Association machinery safety seminars CE marking of machinery has been with us for 20 years now, with the original Machinery Directive 89/392/EEC being a legal requirement since 1 January 1993, with a two-year transition period to allow all manufacturers to be able to comply. This directive was amended a number of times. These amendments ...

  Author: Jonathan Wilkins, marketing manager, European Automation What will humans soon have in common with horses? The answer is obsoletion in the workplace, if a video on YouTube by CGP Grey is anything to believe. The 15-minute video, entitled Humans need not apply, has received 3.5 million views since August 2014 and puts forward the case that advances in manufacturing and technology are inevitably going to make people in all runs of working life – unskilled, skilled, professional ...