AI recreates the painting techniques of famous artists

You can’t go back in time to see how Monet or Van Gogh made their masterpieces, but AI might give you the next best thing. MIT CSAIL researchers have created a machine learning system, Timecraft, that can deduce how a painting was produced and recrea...

Muscle sensors may let you control a drone by clenching your fist

There might be a more intuitive way to control robots and drones than waggling joysticks or tapping at a screen. MIT CSAIL researchers have developed a control method, Conduct-A-Bot, that uses muscle sensors and motion detection for more ‘natural’ ro...

MIT’s ‘smart surface’ could improve your WiFi signal tenfold

There's a problem with stuffing wireless connections into ever-smaller devices: they can struggle to maintain a good signal when there's so little space for antennas. MIT CSAIL researchers might have a fix, though. They've developed an RFocus "smar...

MIT is turning AI into a pizza chef

Never mind having robots deliver pizza -- if MIT and QCRI researchers have their way, the automatons will make your pizza as well. They've developed a neural network, PizzaGAN (Generative Adversarial Network), that learns how to make pizza using pict...

MIT’s ‘RoboRaise’ helps you lift things by studying your muscles

It's all well and good having a virtual assistant like Alexa or Siri in your lounge, but they make for a pretty useless robotic companion when it comes to shifting a sofa or getting a heavy box from a cupboard. MIT CSAIL has a solution in its sights...

Recycling robot can sort paper and plastic by touch

It can be a pain for workers to sort recycling, both because of the safety and the sheer monotony of it. But how do you get robots to do the job when they can't always tell the difference between a can and a cardboard tube? For MIT CSAIL, it's simple...

MIT robot’s flytrap gripper can grab both fragile and heavy objects

Robot hands tend to skew toward extremes. They can pick up delicate objects or heavy objects, but rarely both. MIT CSAIL's solution? Avoid hands altogether. Its researchers have developed a Venus flytrap-like gripper that can grab objects as frag...