Robot Gift Guide 2018

Over a dozen robots that we promise will make fantastic holiday gifts Welcome to the seventh edition of IEEE Spectrum’s Robot Gift Guide! Our apologies for being a bit late with our list this year (too many projects and trips!), but we hope it’ll help you find the best giftable robots for your…

New Class of Metamaterials Changes Physical Properties in Seconds

Mechanical metamaterials can have their rigidity tuned, offering a new approach to soft roboticsMetamaterials seem like a technology out of science fiction. Because of the way these materials affect electromagnetic phenomena and physical attributes of materials, they can render objects invisible, leaving the observer in disbelief. While invisibility cloaks are…

Delivering Wireless Services From the Sky With USRP and LabVIEW Communications

We needed to implement a cost-effective low-altitude aerial testbed that can verify novel wireless communications applications between the airborne node and ground terminals while meeting tight constraints for payload weight, volume and power consumption"By offloading intensive processing tasks, such as fast Fourier transform (FFT) and modulation/coding, to USRP’s built-in FPGA,…

DeepMind Achieves Holy Grail: An AI That Can Master Games Like Chess and Go Without Human Help

AlphaZero, a general-purpose game-playing system, quickly taught itself to be the best player ever in Go, chess and ShogiDeepMind, the London-based subsidiary of Alphabet, has created a system that can quickly master any game in the class that included chess, Go, and Shogi, and do so without human guidance. The system, called AlphaZero, began its…