CSAIL Archives - Liwaiwai

Robotics

Open-Source Platform Simulates Wildlife For Soft Robotics Designers

Since the term “soft robotics” was adopted in 2008, engineers in the field have been building diverse representations of flexible machines useful in exploration, locomotion, rehabilitation, and even space. One source of inspiration: the way animals move in the wild. A team of MIT researchers has taken this a step further, developing SoftZoo, a bio-inspired platform that enables engineers to study soft robot co-design. The framework optimizes algorithms that consist of design, which determines what the robot will look like; and control, or the system that enables robotic motion, improving how users automatically generate outlines for potential machines. Taking a walk on the…

Drones Navigate Unseen Environments With Liquid Neural Networks

In the vast, expansive skies where birds once ruled supreme, a new crop of aviators is taking flight. These pioneers of the air are not living creatures, but rather a product of deliberate innovation: drones. But these aren’t your typical flying bots, humming around like mechanical bees. Rather, they’re avian-inspired marvels that soar through the sky, guided by liquid neural networks to navigate ever-changing and unseen environments with precision and ease. Inspired by the adaptable nature of organic brains, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have introduced a method for robust flight navigation agents to master…

A Four-Legged Robotic System For Playing Soccer On Various Terrains

Researchers created DribbleBot, a system for in-the-wild dribbling on diverse natural terrains including sand, gravel, mud, and snow using onboard sensing and computing. In addition to these football feats, such robots may someday aid humans in search-and-rescue missions. Photo: Mike Grimmett/MIT CSAIL If you’ve ever played soccer with a robot, it’s a familiar feeling. Sun glistens down on your face as the smell of grass permeates the air. You look around. A four-legged robot is hustling toward you, dribbling with determination. While the bot doesn’t display a Lionel Messi-like level of ability, it’s an impressive in-the-wild dribbling system nonetheless. Researchers…

Robotics

Robotic Hand Can Identify Objects With Just One Grasp

MIT researchers developed a soft-rigid robotic finger that incorporates powerful sensors along its entire length, enabling them to produce a robotic hand that could accurately identify objects after only one grasp. Image: Courtesy of the researchers Inspired by the human finger, MIT researchers have developed a robotic hand that uses high-resolution touch sensing to accurately identify an object after grasping it just one time. Many robotic hands pack all their powerful sensors into the fingertips, so an object must be in full contact with those fingertips to be identified, which can take multiple grasps. Other designs use lower-resolution sensors spread…

Machine Learning

Large Language Models Are Biased. Can Logic Help Save Them?

Turns out, even language models “think” they’re biased. When prompted in ChatGPT, the response was as follows: “Yes, language models can have biases, because the training data reflects the biases present in society from which that data was collected. For example, gender and racial biases are prevalent in many real-world datasets, and if a language model is trained on that, it can perpetuate and amplify these biases in its predictions.” A well-known but dangerous problem. Humans (typically) can dabble with both logical and stereotypical reasoning when learning. Still, language models mainly mimic the latter, an unfortunate narrative we’ve seen play…

Technology

Report: CHIPS Act Just The First Step In Addressing Threats To US Leadership In Advanced Computing

When Liu He, a Chinese economist, politician, and “chip czar,” was tapped to lead the charge in a chipmaking arms race with the United States, his message lingered in the air, leaving behind a dewy glaze of tension: “For our country, technology is not just for growth… it is a matter of survival.” Once upon a time, the United States’ early technological prowess positioned the nation to outpace foreign rivals and cultivate a competitive advantage for domestic businesses. Yet, 30 years later, America’s lead in advanced computing is continuing to wane. What happened? A new report from an MIT researcher and two…

Artificial Intelligence

This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain On Code

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures changes in blood flow throughout the brain, has been used over the past couple of decades for a variety of applications, including “functional anatomy” — a way of determining which brain areas are switched on when a person carries out a particular task. fMRI has been used to look at people’s brains while they’re doing all sorts of things — working out math problems, learning foreign languages, playing chess, improvising on the piano, doing crossword puzzles, and even watching TV shows like “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” One pursuit that’s received little attention is computer…

Artificial Intelligence

Subtle Biases In AI Can Influence Emergency Decisions

It’s no secret that people harbor biases — some unconscious, perhaps, and others painfully overt. The average person might suppose that computers — machines typically made of plastic, steel, glass, silicon, and various metals — are free of prejudice. While that assumption may hold for computer hardware, the same is not always true for computer software, which is programmed by fallible humans and can be fed data that is, itself, compromised in certain respects. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems — those based on machine learning, in particular — are seeing increased use in medicine for diagnosing specific diseases, for example, or…

A Faster Way To Preserve Privacy Online

Searching the internet can reveal information a user would rather keep private. For instance, when someone looks up medical symptoms online, they could reveal their health conditions to Google, an online medical database like WebMD, and perhaps hundreds of these companies’ advertisers and business partners. For decades, researchers have been crafting techniques that enable users to search for and retrieve information from a database privately, but these methods remain too slow to be effectively used in practice. MIT researchers have now developed a scheme for private information retrieval that is about 30 times faster than other comparable methods.…

Artificial Intelligence

An Automated Way To Assemble Thousands Of Objects

The manufacturing industry (largely) welcomed artificial intelligence with open arms. Less of the dull, dirty, and dangerous? Say no more. Planning for mechanical assemblies still requires more than scratching out some sketches, of course – it’s a complex conundrum that means dealing with arbitrary 3D shapes and highly constrained motion required for real-world assemblies. Human engineers, understandably, need to jump in the ring and manually design assembly plans and instructions before sending the parts to assembly lines, and this manual nature translates to high labor costs and the potential to be riddled with errors. In a quest to ease some…

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