Tag Archives: awesome
#431414 This Week’s Awesome Stories From ...
QUANTUM COMPUTING IBM Raises the Bar With a 50-Qubit Quantum ComputerWill Knight | MIT Technology Review “50 qubits is a significant landmark in progress toward practical quantum computers. Other systems built so far have had limited capabilities and could perform only calculations that could also be done on a conventional supercomputer. A 50-qubit machine can do things that are extremely difficult to simulate without quantum technology.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AI Startup Embodied Intelligence Wants Robots to Learn From Humans in Virtual RealityEvan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum “This is a defining problem for robotics right now: Robots can do anything you want, as long as you tell them exactly what that is, every single time… This week, Abbeel and several of his colleagues from UC Berkeley and OpenAI are announcing a new startup (with US $7 million in seed funding) called Embodied Intelligence, which will ‘enable industrial robot arms to perceive and act like humans instead of just strictly following pre-programmed trajectories.’”
TRANSPORTATION Uber’s Plan to Launch Flying Cars in LA by 2020 Really Could Take OffJack Stewart | Wired“After grabbing an elevator, passengers will tap their phones to pass through a turnstile and access the roof. Presumably they’ve been prescreened, because there’s no airport-style security in evidence. An agent in an orange vest takes a group of four passengers out to the waiting aircraft. There’s a pilot up front, and a small overhead display with the estimated arrival time.”
ROBOTICS This Robot Swarm Finishes Your Grocery Shopping in MinutesJesus Diaz | Fast Company “At an Ocado warehouse in the English town of Andover, a swarm of 1,000 robots races over a grid the size of a soccer field, filling orders and replacing stock. The new system, which went live earlier this year, can fulfill a 50-item order in under five minutes—something that used to take about two hours at human-only facilities. It’s been so successful that Ocado is now building a new warehouse that’s three times larger in Erith, southeast of London.”
BIOTECH Meet the Scientists Building a Library of Designer DrugsAngela Chen | The Verge“One of the most prominent categories of designer drugs are those intended to mimic marijuana, called synthetic cannabinoids. Marijuana, or cannabis, is widely considered one of the safest drugs, but synthetic cannabinoids are some of the most dangerous synthetic drugs.”
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#431368 This Week’s Awesome Stories From ...
INTERNET OF THINGSAmazon Key Is a New Service That Lets Couriers Unlock Your Front DoorBen Popper | The Verge“When a courier arrives with a package for in-home delivery, they scan the barcode, sending a request to Amazon’s cloud. If everything checks out, the cloud grants permission by sending a message back to the camera, which starts recording. The courier then gets a prompt on their app, swipes the screen, and voilà, your door unlocks.”
ROBOTICSWatch Yamaha’s Humanoid Robot Ride a Motorcycle Around a RacetrackPhilip E. Ross | IEEE Spectrum“What’s striking is that the bike is unmodified: the robot is a hunched-over form on top. It senses the environment, calculates what to do, keeps the bike stable, manages acceleration and deceleration—all while factoring in road conditions, air resistance, and engine braking.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCETech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries for Scarce A.I. TalentCade Metz | The New York Times“Typical A.I. specialists, including both Ph.D.s fresh out of school and people with less education and just a few years of experience, can be paid from $300,000 to $500,000 a year or more in salary and company stock, according to nine people who work for major tech companies or have entertained job offers from them. All of them requested anonymity because they did not want to damage their professional prospects.”
HEALTH This Doctor Diagnosed His Own Cancer With an iPhone UltrasoundAntonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review“The device he used, called the Butterfly IQ, is the first solid-state ultrasound machine to reach the market in the U.S. Ultrasound works by shooting sound into the body and capturing the echoes. Usually, the sound waves are generated by a vibrating crystal. But Butterfly’s machine instead uses 9,000 tiny drums etched onto a semiconductor chip.”
ENTREPRENEURSHIPWeWork: A $20 Billion Startup Fueled by Silicon Valley Pixie DustEliot Brown | Wall Street Journal“WeWork’s strategy carries the costs and risks associated with traditional real estate. Its client list is heavily weighted toward startups that may or may not be around for long. WeWork is on the hook for long-term leases, and it doesn’t own its own buildings. Vacancy rates have risen recently, and the company is increasing incentives to draw tenants… The model has proved popular, with 150,000 individuals renting space in more than 170 locations globally.”
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#431170 This Week’s Awesome Stories From ...
AUGMENTED REALITY
ZED Mini Turns Rift and Vive Into an AR Headset From the FutureBen Lang | Road to VR“When attached, the camera provides stereo pass-through video and real-time depth and environment mapping, turning the headsets into dev kits emulating the capabilities of high-end AR headsets of the future. The ZED Mini will launch in November.”
ROBOTICS
Life-Size Humanoid Robot Is Designed to Fall Over (and Over and Over)Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum “The researchers came up with a new strategy for not worrying about falls: not worrying about falls. Instead, they’ve built their robot from the ground up with an armored structure that makes it totally okay with falling over and getting right back up again.”
SPACE
Russia Will Team up With NASA to Build a Lunar Space StationAnatoly Zak | Popular Mechanics “NASA and its partner agencies plan to begin the construction of the modular habitat known as the Deep-Space Gateway in orbit around the Moon in the early 2020s. It will become the main destination for astronauts for at least a decade, extending human presence beyond the Earth’s orbit for the first time since the end of the Apollo program in 1972. Launched on NASA’s giant SLS rocket and serviced by the crews of the Orion spacecraft, the outpost would pave the way to a mission to Mars in the 2030s.”
TRANSPORTATION
Dubai Starts Testing Crewless Two-Person ‘Flying Taxis’Thuy Ong | The Verge“The drone was uncrewed and hovered 200 meters high during the test flight, according to Reuters. The AAT, which is about two meters high, was supplied by specialist German manufacturer Volocopter, known for its eponymous helicopter drone hybrid with 18 rotors…Dubai has a target for autonomous transport to account for a quarter of total trips by 2030.”
AUTONOMOUS CARS
Toyota Is Trusting a Startup for a Crucial Part of Its Newest Self-Driving CarsJohana Bhuiyan | Recode “Toyota unveiled the next generation of its self-driving platform today, which features more accurate object detection technology and mapping, among other advancements. These test cars—which Toyota is testing on both a closed driving course and on some public roads—will also be using Luminar’s lidar sensors, or radars that use lasers to detect the distance to an object.”
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#431093 Video Friday: SpaceX Rocket Mishaps, ...
Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos Continue reading →
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#431078 This Year’s Awesome Robot Stories From ...
Each week we scour the web for great articles and fascinating advances across our core topics, from AI to biotech and the brain. But robots have a special place in our hearts. This week, we took a look back at 2017 so far and unearthed a few favorite robots for your reading and viewing pleasure.
Tarzan the Swinging Robot Could Be the Future of FarmingMariella Moon | Engadget“Tarzan will be able to swing over crops using its 3D-printed claws and parallel guy-wires stretched over fields. It will then take measurements and pictures of each plant with its built-in camera while suspended…While it may take some time to achieve that goal, the researchers plan to start testing the robot soon.”
Grasping Robots Compete to Rule Amazon’s Warehouses Tom Simonite | Wired“Robots able to help with so-called picking tasks would boost Amazon’s efficiency—and make it much less reliant on human workers. It’s why the company has invited a motley crew of mechanical arms, grippers, suction cups—and their human handlers—to Nagoya, Japan, this week to show off their manipulation skills.”
Robots Learn to Speak Body LanguageAlyssa Pagano | IEEE Spectrum“One notable feature of the OpenPose system is that it can track not only a person’s head, torso, and limbs but also individual fingers. To do that, the researchers used CMU’s Panoptic Studio, a dome lined with 500 cameras, where they captured body poses at a variety of angles and then used those images to build a data set.”
I Watched Two Robots Chat Together on Stage at a Tech EventJon Russell | TechCrunch“The robots in question are Sophia and Han, and they belong to Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong-based company that is developing and deploying artificial intelligence in humanoids. The duo took to the stage at Rise in Hong Kong with Hanson Robotics’ Chief Scientist Ben Goertzel directing the banter. The conversation, which was partially scripted, wasn’t as slick as the human-to-human panels at the show, but it was certainly a sight to behold for the packed audience.”
How This Japanese Robotics Master Is Building Better, More Human AndroidsHarry McCracken | Fast Company“On the tech side, making a robot look and behave like a person involves everything from electronics to the silicone Ishiguro’s team uses to simulate skin. ‘We have a technology to precisely control pneumatic actuators,’ he says, noting, as an example of what they need to re-create, that ‘the human shoulder has four degrees of freedom.’”
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