Robotics

Internet Data Produce A Racist, Sexist Robot
A robot operating with a popular internet-based artificial intelligence system consistently gravitates to men over women, white people over people of color, and jumps to conclusions about peoples’ jobs after a glance at their face. The work is believed to be the first to show that robots loaded with an accepted and widely used model …

MIT Engineers Devise A Recipe For Improving Any Autonomous Robotic System
Autonomous robots have come a long way since the fastidious Roomba. In recent years, artificially intelligent systems have been deployed in self-driving cars, last-mile food delivery, restaurant service, patient screening, hospital cleaning, meal prep, building security, and warehouse packing. Each of these robotic systems is a product of an ad hoc design process specific to …

Robotic Lightning Bugs Take Flight
Fireflies that light up dusky backyards on warm summer evenings use their luminescence for communication — to attract a mate, ward off predators, or lure prey. These glimmering bugs also sparked the inspiration of scientists at MIT. Taking a cue from nature, they built electroluminescent soft artificial muscles for flying, insect-scale robots. The tiny …

Stanford Engineers Develop Tiny Robots To Bring Health Care Closer To Precisely Targeted Drug Delivery
If you’ve ever swallowed the same round tablet in hopes of curing everything from stomach cramps to headaches, you already know that medicines aren’t always designed to treat precise pain points. While over-the-counter pills have cured many ailments for decades, biomedical researchers have only recently begun exploring ways to improve targeted drug delivery when treating …

Machine Learning Is Important, But Some AIs Just Want To Have Fun
This video by the French computer programmer Damien Henry is a clever visual demonstration of machine learning – a term coined by the US computer scientist Arthur Samuel (1901-1990) to describe an algorithm that gives computers the ‘ability to learn without being explicitly programmed’. Using several videos recorded from windows during train rides, Henry trained an algorithm …

How A Robotics Startup Switched Clouds And Reduced Its Kubernetes Ops Costs With GKE Autopilot
Don’t look now, but Brain Corp operates over 20,000 of its robots in factories, supermarkets, schools and warehouses, taking on time-consuming assignments like cleaning floors, taking inventory, restocking shelves, etc. And BrainOS®, the AI software platform that powers these autonomous mobile robots, doesn’t just run in the robots themselves — it runs in the cloud. Specifically, Google …

Intel RealSense Depth Camera D435f: New Infrared Pass Filters For Better Range Performance
On June 1, 2022, Intel introduced the Intel RealSense Depth Camera D435f, a high-precision, mid-range stereo camera built to enhance the performance of Intel’s industry-leading Intel RealSense Depth Camera D435 through the addition of infrared (IR) pass filters. (Credit: Intel Corporation) What’s New: Today, Intel introduced the Intel® RealSense™ Depth Camera D435f, a high precision, …

Charting A Safe Course Through A Highly Uncertain Environment
An autonomous spacecraft exploring the far-flung regions of the universe descends through the atmosphere of a remote exoplanet. The vehicle, and the researchers who programmed it, don’t know much about this environment. With so much uncertainty, how can the spacecraft plot a trajectory that will keep it from being squashed by some randomly moving …

Qualcomm Advances Development Of Smarter And Safer Autonomous Robots For Logistics, Industry 4.0, And Urban Aerial Mobility With Next-Generation 5G And AI Robotics Solutions
As 5G proliferates beyond the smartphone, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. has acted as a catalyst in enabling 5G to scale and revolutionize the robotics industry. At the annual Qualcomm® 5G Summit event, the Company is unveiling an expanded roadmap of cutting-edge 5G and edge-AI robotics solutions with the introduction of the Qualcomm Robotics RB6 Platform and …

An Easier Way To Teach Robots New Skills
With e-commerce orders pouring in, a warehouse robot picks mugs off a shelf and places them into boxes for shipping. Everything is humming along, until the warehouse processes a change and the robot must now grasp taller, narrower mugs that are stored upside down. Reprogramming that robot involves hand-labeling thousands of images that show it …