Despite significant medical advances, spinal cord damage remains one of the most difficult physical injuries to treat. Scarring frequently gets in the way of nerve fiber regrowth, while nerve cells usually cannot regenerate on their own. A possible solution? A fleet of stem cell-infused, injectable nanorobots that can help nerve cells regenerate. The tiny bots are detailed in a study recently published in the journal Nature Materials.
To build their new tools, a team at ETH Zurich in Switzerland engineered microscopic machines that combine living neural progenitor cells (NPCs)—specialized stem cells developed for the spine—with customized nanoparticles. These customized nanoparticles feature two layers—one that is sensitive to magnetic fields and another that translates them into electrical signals.
“We place a reservoir in the center where we trap the cells. Then we inject the nanoparticles and wait for the two components to bind,” Salvador Pané i Vidal, a study co-author and ETH Zurich roboticist, said in a statement.
Each nanorobot is about six micrometers wide, making them smaller than a red blood cell. However, the number of robots required to pull off a procedure is immense. Millions of nanobots are needed during animal trials. Even with such a high number, the initial experimental results are promising. In tests involving mice with severed spinal cords, nerve cells stimulated by the microrobots began reconnecting at the injury site within 28 days. By the end of the trial, the mice displayed major improvements in movement, gait, coordination, and exploratory behavior.
Significantly more research is required before these nanobots are ready for primetime, but the team hopes to one day begin testing similar devices in humans. Before that, they need to determine the most effective magnetic fields and how long to apply them to patients. In the meantime, the overall design could also be applied to help treat regenerative issues in organs and wounds.
“The reproducible and scalable production of microrobots using our lab-on-a-chip system demonstrates that the platform’s application potential extends beyond basic research,” added Pané i Vidal.
The US military invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of its president is just one more step in WAR - BOOM - BUST. The collapsing world economies are being engineered by satanic globalist banksters and megacorporation elites, and are using the ensuing chaos to force you into digital prison, and ultimately more enslavement.
Scientists from the Advanced Robotics Research Center at the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM) have developed a new process to weave ultra-thin fibers of shape-memory alloy (SMA) into fabric artificial muscles, enabling wearablerobotic clothing that tests have shown can increase the wearer’s strength and reduce muscle load by up to 40%.
Although wearable robots designed with the new fabric-weaving process are currently limited to the laboratory phase, the KIMM research team behind the breakthrough method is already working on prototype designs for individuals suffering from strength and mobility limitations, with the ultimate goal of finding a commercial partner to bring their super-strength fabric manufacturing process to the wider marketplace.
Current Wearable Robot Technologies Face Severe Limitations
In an email to The Debrief, Dr. Cheol Hoon Park, Principal Researcher at KIMM’s Advanced Robotics Research Center and the leader of the wearable robot project, explained that many countries are entering a “super-aged” phase of society, and the demand for wearable robot technology that can increase strength and mobility is expected to dramatically increase.
However, Dr. Park noted that for such technologies to become more widely available, the limitations of current technologies must be overcome.
“They must be lightweight, comfortable to wear, and affordable,” the project leader explained.
For example, conventional wearable robots designed to provide strength and support to multiple joints, such as the shoulder, elbow, and wrist, rely on heavy, noisy motors or pneumatic actuators. The research team noted that these components make systems bulky, expensive, and uncomfortable to wear, especially during extended use. The answer has been an increased reliance on simpler, single-joint, wearable robots. Still, assisting large, complex joints like the shoulder has remained a major obstacle.
Now, Dr. Park and the KIMM team said they’ve created a system for weaving fabric muscles into fabric, resulting in a scalable method for mass-producing wearable-robot clothing that is quiet, streamlined, easy to use, and consumes very little power.
Heat From a Battery Pack Causes Artificial Muscle Fibers to Contract
Instead of air-powered actuators or bulky electric motors that add power to human muscles and joints, Dr. Park’s team created fabric muscles using small fibers of a material called shape-memory alloy. SMAs are materials that regain their original shape when exposed to elevated temperatures or pressures.
For this application, the team used an SMA wire with a diameter of 25 μm, or roughly one-fourth the width of a human hair. Next, the KIMM team processed the individual wires into coil-shaped ‘yarn.’ Like traditional yarn, this SMA yarn can enable the continuous weaving of fabric muscles.
Dr. Cheol Hoon Park, principal researcher at the Advanced Robotics Research Center of KIMM, operates the automated muscle-fabric weaving machine. Image Credit: Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM).
When asked by The Debrief how their fabric muscle wearable robot works, Dr. Park explained that the SMA coil fibers that make up the muscles contract when heated to “about 40–50 °C.” However, he notes, the user is unlikely to notice the material being heated, so it can exert a directional force to assist muscle movement and reduce joint load, “thanks to an insulating fabric layer.”
“Like human muscles, the fabric muscle contracts as it heats up and relaxes as it cools down,” Dr. Park told The Debrief. “Cooling fans are not required when the user simply holds a load, but for repetitive lifting tasks, faster cooling is needed, so the fans help accelerate the process.” Park added that fans can be integrated in future consumer versions of the jacket, “depending on the use case.”
The wearable robot is powered by a 200 g battery pack mounted on the back of the jacket, which also includes a compact controller to change settings. Park said that the contraction force exerted by the fabric muscles can be altered by changing “the amount and duration of electric current” supplied to the system’s SMA fibers.
Depending on the setting level the user selects and their activity level, Dr. Park told The Debrief that the system “can typically operate for about four hours on a single charge.”
Tests Show 40% Reduced Muscle Effort and 57% Increase in Range of Motion
According to the team’s announcement, the KIMM team’s prototype wearable robot, a jacket with the SMA fiber muscles built in, was able to simultaneously assist the wearer’s elbow, shoulder, and waist. Tests showed that the less-than-2-kilogram jacket reduced muscle effort by more than 40% during repetitive physical tasks. Notably, the 10g of wearable robot fabric at the core of the system can light 10-15 kilograms (22-33 lbs.)
A more complex shoulder-assist, wearable robot weighing just 840 grams (less than 2 pounds), tested in clinical trials at Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH) on patients with muscular weakness, including those with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, improved average shoulder movement range by over 57%.
When discussing the next phase of development, Dr. Park told The Debrief that they are currently “developing and evaluating a prototype of the clothing-type wearable robot in the form of pants.”
“We expect that it could help people who have difficulty walking on slopes or stairs, or standing for long periods of time,” the project leader explained.
Wearable Robot Clothing Could Reach the Market Within 1-2 Years After Agreement
Although the current version of the wearable is not yet commercially available, Dr. Park noted that the core technology for weaving SMA fibers into fabric muscles was developed at a non-profit research institute, “so it will need to be transferred to an industrial partner for commercialization.”
We have already developed both the manufacturing equipment for mass-producing the fabric muscle — the core component — and a working prototype of the wearable robot,” he added.
Principal Researcher Dr. Cheol Hoon Park (right) at the Advanced Robotics Research Center of KIMM. Image Credit: Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM).
Although there is no pending agreement with a commercial partner to date, Dr. Park told The Debrief that once they transfer their technology to a commercial partner, they expect it could reach the commercial market “within one to two years.”
Although there are potential uses for the team’s fiber muscle-weaving process, including enhanced strength “super soldiers,” Dr. Park told The Debrief, “We hope that the fabric muscle we developed—and the clothing-type wearable robot based on it—will help make wearable robotics more accessible and ultimately improve the quality of life for many people.”
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.
Communicating underwater has always been a major challenge for robots. Unlike on land, where wireless signals travel easily through the air, water absorbs and weakens many forms of communication. This makes it difficult for underwater robots to share information, coordinate missions, and send updates back to human operators. Now, researchers at the University of Florida […]
A San Francisco robotics startup is being taken to court by an Airbnb host who claims the company’s “robotic prototype testing” caused extensive damage to his home.
In the lawsuit filed on May 26, 2026, Sean Donovan is seeking more than $12,000 in damages from the Bay Area startup The Bot Company. The court case was first reported by SFGate, which also interviewed Donovan about the unprecedented mess he encountered after the startup’s employees supposedly rented his former childhood home through Airbnb.
The first clue that the guests were not typical tech startup employees needing a temporary crash pad came when Donovan was taking care of the trash during the guests’ stay. He told SFGate about seeing “bundles of wires” throughout the house and a robot he described as a 6-foot-tall “Roomba with treads” that also resembled the cybernetic Borg from the Star Trek universe.
A San Francisco robotics startup is being taken to court by an Airbnb host who claims the company’s “robotic prototype testing” caused extensive damage to his home.
In the lawsuit filed on May 26, 2026, Sean Donovan is seeking more than $12,000 in damages from the Bay Area startup The Bot Company. The court case was first reported by SFGate, which also interviewed Donovan about the unprecedented mess he encountered after the startup’s employees supposedly rented his former childhood home through Airbnb.
The first clue that the guests were not typical tech startup employees needing a temporary crash pad came when Donovan was taking care of the trash during the guests’ stay. He told SFGate about seeing “bundles of wires” throughout the house and a robot he described as a 6-foot-tall “Roomba with treads” that also resembled the cybernetic Borg from the Star Trek universe.
Entre proezas acrobáticas e demonstrações de força em preparação para o trabalho em fábricas, o robot Atlas da Boston Dynamics também tem tempo para dar uns toques na bola e para aprender a ser um craque no futebol.
It seems like every week there’s another example of a new robot modeled after a real creature in the animal kingdom. From dogs and bats, to roaches and desert lizards, the natural world is a constant source of inspiration for engineers. But while most robotics researchers use animals as a base for their machine’s movement, an ambitious team of Duke University engineers set out to make something entirely new: a robot whose form factor and movement aren’t derived from biology, but from the universe’s underlying physics.
Say hello to Argus, a 20-legged, blob-looking robot capable of seeing in all directions at the same time and able to move almost instantly in any direction. The amorphous-looking sphere has no top or bottom, no left or right, and will keep trekking through sand, dirt, and gravel even when some of its legs are destroyed. It can also use its many legs to shimmy up narrow walls, a move similar to a wall jump in “Super Mario.”
The engineers behind Argus say their intriguing, if not slightly terrifying, creation isn’t just another incremental step forward in robotics. It’s the first member of a totally new category of “dynamically symmetric machines.” The findings were published this week in the journal Science Robotics.
“Watching Argus move is unlike watching any other robot we’ve worked with,” study co-author and Duke PhD student Jiaxun Liu said in a statement . “The first time we saw it navigate among trees and rough terrain, even under heavy collisions, we knew this was something different.”
Biological tradeoffs
Though somewhat human-looking, upright bipedal robots from companies like Figure and Tesla are all the rage these days, engineers have long looked to other animals to inspire their machines, because animals are simply better than Homo sapiens at certain tasks. Dogs and other quadrupeds are more agile, bats can fly, and bugs can scurry into hard-to-reach places.
However, at least in terms of movement, each of the pluses of these specific animals has also come with some minuses. Dogs and other quadrupeds are remarkably fast and nimble when moving forwards, but ask them to replicate that movement when moving backwards and you’re in for a problem.
With those inherent biological tradeoffs in mind, the team at Duke’s General Robotics Lab set out to make something completely different. Taking inspiration from underlying physics, they wanted to see if they could make a robot based around “dynamic symmetry,” which they define as the ability to generate forces and acceleration with uniform magnitude in all directions.
In other words, such a robot would take the idea of left or right and up and down and throw them out the window. Instead, it would be capable of moving in any direction, at any time, without any privilege given to one particular direction. The goal was essentially to build possibly the world’s first “omnidirectional” robot.
Argus keeps on coming—even when you break its legs
The design team eventually settled on a spherical core, or base, with a bunch of legs sticking out of it. They made multiple versions in a simulation, one with as few as eight legs and another with as many as 40. Eventually they settled on an even 20 legs for the physical build. Each of those legs is tipped with a camera that serves as one of Argus’ many eyes. Fitting, then, that it’s named after a many-eyed giant in Greek mythology. The researchers describe Argus as visually similar to a sea urchin, but even that’s selling it short. It doesn’t really look like anything in nature, which makes its uncanny movement in real-world testing all the more unsettling.
In testing, Argus could move in any direction just as quickly and comfortably as any other. The upside of that is that the blob is actually quite adaptable to different terrain despite its unusual appearance. It can easily traverse forest, wet surfaces, and sand, and could climb over certain obstacles. Argus’ ability to rapidly redistribute its weight also meant that it excelled at recovering when researchers tried to shove it off course. While Argus isn’t the first robot to right itself after getting pummeled by a researcher, what makes it unique is that it can redistribute its weight even if some of its legs get damaged or fail altogether.
In other words, you can chop off Argus’ legs and it will just keep coming.
Argus joins a family of DARPA-backed robots
The Duke researchers frame their interest in building this new category of machine as primarily motivated by pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in mechanical science. Still, it’s hard not to ignore the researchers’ most notable funder: the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Known for incubating some of the military’s most notorious research and development projects, DARPA is responsible for everything from Boston Dynamics’ beef Atlas humanoid to a massive, experimental manta ray inspired uncrewed underwater vehicle.
So, while it’s still not clear what exactly Argus will ever be used for, paper coauthor and postdoctoral researcher at Duke’s General Robotics Lab Boxi Xia says the experimentation and exploration was success in itself.
“Argus is an existence proof,” Xia said in a statement. “It shows that designing for dynamic symmetry isn’t just a theoretical curiosity. It produces a robot you can deploy in the wild, on uneven ground and in clutter, even in low-gravity settings. It changes what’s possible.”
To effectively travel on Mars, rovers need to deal with a lot of sand. German engineers have created a new kind of ground rover that uses swimming motions to push through sand that may otherwise cause the wheels to get stuck. Its inspiration: the African sandfish (Scincus scincus), a lizard known for burrowing into the Sahara Desert and literally swimming through its sand like a fish. It’s one of the animal kingdom’s strangest methods of propulsion, but it may help shape the future of Mars exploration.
A video of the rover, released this week by the University of Würzburg, shows a mini-fridge-sized, silver rover making its way through a sandy, Martian-mimicking test floor. Rather than rolling forward, each of its four wheels cuts through the sand in what looks like a figure-eight motion. The rover pushes on several yards and then cuts a corner and returns to where it started.
“The wheels mimic the animal’s [sandfish’s]characteristic interaction with the ground, generating both longitudinal and lateral forces,” University of Würzburg researcher Amenosis Lopez said in a statement. “The rover leaves sinusoidal tracks in the sand.”
The sandfish: nature’s cute solution to slippery sand
Though most people likely associate space rovers with round wheels or tracks reminiscent of those on WALL-E, neither design is ideal for dealing with Mars’s uniquely harsh and sandy environment. Sand is unique because it’s a material with both solid and liquid-like qualities. On top of sand’s mixed texture, rovers roaming on the Red Planet have to deal with steep slopes and uneven terrain, where varying levels of slipperiness can cause imbalance. Patches of softer sand are also a nightmare for wheels, making the prospect of a rover getting stuck never far from mind
But nature figured out a solution to this issue millions of years ago, and it’s called the sandfish. Contrary to its name, the Sahara Desert native is a lizard in the skink family. Above ground, the sandfish uses its tiny legs to scrabble around much the same as any lizard. Things get more interesting when it burrows down into the sand. X-ray imaging shows the sandfish propelling itself forward under the sand, using a powerful waving motion to generate thrust and overcome drag. The result looks like an animal swimming through the sand, remarkably similarly to how a fish would oscillate its body to move through water
Engineers at Georgia Tech took those observations and used them to create their own sandfish robot in 2011. Testing with their robots showed that the little lizard’s oddly wedged shaped head may also help it generate lift forces and more easily swim through sand.
Sink or swim: new rover did both
Researchers working on the sandfish-inspired robot said it outperformed a wheeled version when navigating through a sandy test track. Where the round wheels would wobble and weave, the oscillating wheels stayed relatively stable. That’s not to say the new approach worked right out of the gate. Early models of the design were reportedly so heavy that the rover literally sank into the sand. The team went back to the drawing board and made a second version, this time increasing each wheel’s width and reducing overall mass
It’s unlikely these oddball new wheels will become the main chassis system for NASA rovers, at least not in the immediate future. More work still needs to be done to increase their overall controllability and account for slippage that can occur in complicated, real-world environments. There are also the added variables of accounting for scientific instruments and other cargo a rover might have to carry.
More than anything, the wheel design is a testament to the sandfish’s innate ingenuity and evolutionary gifts. Many scientists only recently began to truly appreciate these traits and what other technology they could inspire.
Stairs are one of the most difficult environments for robots to navigate safely. Even robots specifically designed to climb stairs can lose balance, and when they do, the results can be serious. A heavy robot tumbling down a staircase can damage itself, damage property, and potentially injure nearby people. Now, researchers at the Singapore University […]
A tech startup is offering New York City residents free home cleaning with a twist—it will send “professional cleaners” wearing cameras to record everything they do. All that data will supposedly be used to train AI-driven robots.
The unusual pitch comes from the German startup MicroAGI, whose website describes the company as a “team of engineers, researchers, and operators on a mission to accelerate embodied AI.” It began publicizing the free home-cleaning service run through its newly launched Shift app on May 28, with posts on social media sites such as X and LinkedIn featuring a video set to the upbeat piano notes of the Jay-Z and Alicia Keys song “Empire State of Mind.”
The Shift app website claims it “connects New Yorkers with free, trusted professional house cleaners” in exchange for recording “first-person cleaning footage to help train the next generation of household robots.” The “book a free cleaning” link directs clients to enter information such as a phone number, email address, and home address, along with access instructions, before booking an appointment that lasts an estimated two hours.
A tech startup is offering New York City residents free home cleaning with a twist—it will send “professional cleaners” wearing cameras to record everything they do. All that data will supposedly be used to train AI-driven robots.
The unusual pitch comes from the German startup MicroAGI, whose website describes the company as a “team of engineers, researchers, and operators on a mission to accelerate embodied AI.” It began publicizing the free home-cleaning service run through its newly launched Shift app on May 28, with posts on social media sites such as X and LinkedIn featuring a video set to the upbeat piano notes of the Jay-Z and Alicia Keys song “Empire State of Mind.”
The Shift app website claims it “connects New Yorkers with free, trusted professional house cleaners” in exchange for recording “first-person cleaning footage to help train the next generation of household robots.” The “book a free cleaning” link directs clients to enter information such as a phone number, email address, and home address, along with access instructions, before booking an appointment that lasts an estimated two hours.
Last month at Beijing’s half marathon, a robot named Lightning beat the human world record by nearly seven minutes. It’s the latest in a string of AI-powered milestones that have got people wondering whether robots are about to enter our everyday lives, just as chatbots have. And the country leading the charge is China, where the government has pledged to invest more than £100bn in robotics over the next 20 years. To find out how robots are already entering the workforce, and what needs to happen to get them cleaning our homes and weeding our gardens, Ian Sample hears from the Guardian’s senior China correspondent, Amy Hawkins, and from Nathan Lepora, professor of robotics and AI at Bristol University, who researches how robots can achieve human-like dexterity
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