Until now, dressing robots, designed to help an elderly person or a person with a disability get dressed, have been created in the laboratory as a one-armed machine, but research has shown that this can be uncomfortable for the person in care.

To solve this problem, Dr Jihong Zhu, a robotics researcher at the University of York’s Institute, proposed a two-armed assistive dressing plan, which has been inspired by caregivers who have demonstrated that specific actions are required to reduce discomfort to the individual in their care.

Dr Zhu gathered important information on how care workers moved during a dressing exercise, through allowing a robot to observe and learn from human movements and then, through AI, generate a model that mimics (模仿) how human helpers do their task. This allowed the researchers to gather enough data to illustrate that two hands were needed for dressing and not one, as well as information on the angles that the arms make.

Dr Zhu said, “We know that practical tasks, such as getting dressed, can be done by a robot, freeing up a care worker to concentrate more on providing companionship and observing the general well-being of the individual in their care. It has been tested in the laboratory, but for this to work outside of the lab, we really need to understand how care workers do this task in real life.”

“We’ve adopted a method called learning from demonstration, which means that you don’t need an expert to programme a robot; a human just needs to demonstrate the motion that is required of the robot and the robot learns that action. It is clear that for care workers two arms are needed to properly attend to the needs of individuals,” Dr. Zhu said. “With the current one-armed machine scheme a patient is required to do too much work in order for a robot to assist them, moving their arm up in the air or bending it in ways that they might not be able to do.”

Macinley Butson was just 16 years old when she first had the idea to try and protect women from more — than — necessary radiation during breast cancer treatments—and now, her invention could be a game-changer in the medical field.

Butson, whose father works in medical physics, has always been interested in science. But she only began researching the harmful side effects of radiation treatment after her father discussed his experience with ineffective cancer treatments in his work. Since Butson had also recently lost a relative to breast cancer, she felt inspired to conduct her own research on the subject. She tried to begin her medical research by consulting scientific journals, but she found their academic terms almost impossible to understand.

She then turned to the Internet to find videos that taught how to read scientific journals. As she went deeper in her research, she stumbled upon a key bit of information: copper （铜）has been shown to be effective at protecting skin from radiation. An idea hit this Australian teen as she was viewing a film on medieval wars in her 10th grade history class. When she saw the scaled （鳞片） patterns of the mail （盔甲）,she was inspired to create a wearable protective tool out of copper. She then headed back online and watched videos on how to put together tiny scales. She made her own flexible scale-mail which she now calls SMART: Scale Mail for Radiation Therapy.

When her invention was tested in a laboratory setting, it reduced surface exposure to unnecessary radiation by 75%. And now Butson is working on getting her SMART into clinical settings for use.

Nowadays robots are taking the world of sports by storm, from the six-legged skier to the ping pong ace and the expert curler.

Mini Cheetah, a four-legged robot, was trained up by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley’s Hybrid Robotics Lab.

The robot can handle a range of thrown and kicked shots from humans. It can squat, jump, sidestep and dive to stop shots. It can save 87.5 per cent of shots taken on goal, compared to the average for human keepers of around 69 per cent.

Google’s ping-pong robot arm recently completed an epic 340-shot rally (对打) with a human. The arm plays “cooperatively” to get a good rally going, but according to Google its skills could be built up to match the level of a serious human competitor.

Researchers wanted to train it up in a simulation so it could play with humans in the real world. China’s badminton bot

In China, researchers have created a robot called the Robomintoner that can play badminton against human competitors.

The machine looks a bit like a lawnmower (割草机), but it firmly grips its badminton racket just like any human player would. It also gets sufficient power into the shuttlecock using a swift flicking motion, and zips around the court on four wheels.

Also in China, experts from the Shanghai JiaoTong University created a skiing robot that can control its own descent down a snowy slope. The machine stands with two legs on each ski and grips ski poles with its middle legs, which it can manoeuvre (操纵) to control direction.

The robot can stay upright, turn and avoid crashing to people. It is also capable of skiing at more than 30 feet per second across a 1, 300-foot course on an 18-degree slope.