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Roboticist Barbara Mazzolai Pushes New 'Sustainability Robotics' Field

Italian Institute of Technology's Barbara Mazzolai, known for bioinspired robots modeled on octopuses, plant roots and seeds, has co-authored a manifesto in Nature Machine Intelligence proposing a new discipline called sustainability robotics. The approach calls for embedding environmental impact reduction directly into how robots are designed, rather than treating it as an afterthought.

spectrum.ieee.org · 2026-09-22 · barbara mazzolai, bioinspired robotics, sustainability robotics

New AI tool CW-Net explains self-driving car decisions using human concepts

Researchers led by Kenny et al. published in Nature a system called Concept-Wrapper Network (CW-Net) that opens up the 'black box' of autonomous vehicle decision-making. Instead of opaque outputs, CW-Net translates a car's reasoning into human-understandable concepts, such as recognizing a pedestrian or obstacle, so passengers can better anticipate its next move. Testing showed this approach improved people's ability to predict vehicle behavior even in cases where the car made errors.

nature.com · 2026-09-02 · concept-wrapper network, autonomous vehicle, nature machine intelligence