Tag Archives: healthcare
#439262 4 Top Healthcare and Medical Apps
Photo by Torsten Dettlaff from Pexels Tech is playing a vital role as humans strengthen their path to value-based services. Thanks to machine learning and artificial intelligence, it became possible to create applications that would replace hospitals and doctors in the epoch of COVID-19. You don’t have to make appointments, waste time in waiting lines or leave your …
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Posted in Human Robots
#439040 Ready for duty: Healthcare robots get ...
Not long after the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, Czech writer Karel Čapek first introduced the term “robot” to describe artificial people in his 1921 sci-fi play R.U.R. While we have not yet created the highly intelligent humanoid robots imagined by Čapek, the robots most commonly used today are complex systems that work alongside humans, assisting with an ever-expanding set of tasks. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439032 To Learn To Deal With Uncertainty, This ...
AI is endowing robots, autonomous vehicles and countless of other forms of tech with new abilities and levels of self-sufficiency. Yet these models faithfully “make decisions” based on whatever data is fed into them, which could have dangerous consequences. For instance, if an autonomous car is driving down a highway and the sensor picks up a confusing signal (e.g., a paint smudge that is incorrectly interpreted as a lane marking), this could cause the car to swerve into another lane unnecessarily.
But in the ever-evolving world of AI, researchers are developing new ways to address challenges like this. One group of researchers has devised a new algorithm that allows the AI model to account for uncertain data, which they describe in a study published February 15 in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems.
“While we would like robots to work seamlessly in the real world, the real world is full of uncertainty,” says Michael Everett, a post-doctoral associate at MIT who helped develop the new approach. “It's important for a system to be aware of what it knows and what it is unsure about, which has been a major challenge for modern AI.”
His team focused on a type of AI called reinforcement learning (RL), whereby the model tries to learn the “value” of taking each action in a given scenario through trial-and-error. They developed a secondary algorithm, called Certified Adversarial Robustness for deep RL (CARRL), that can be built on top of an existing RL model.
“Our key innovation is that rather than blindly trusting the measurements, as is done today [by AI models], our algorithm CARRL thinks through all possible measurements that could have been made, and makes a decision that considers the worst-case outcome,” explains Everett.
In their study, the researchers tested CARRL across several different tasks, including collision avoidance simulations and Atari pong. For younger readers who may not be familiar with it, Atari pong is a classic computer game whereby an electronic paddle is used to direct a ping pong on the screen. In the test scenario, CARRL helped move the paddle slightly higher or lower to compensate for the possibility that the ball could approach at a slightly different point than what the input data indicated. All the while, CARRL would try to ensure that the ball would make contact with at least some part of paddle.
Gif: MIT Aerospace Controls Laboratory
In a perfect world, the information that an AI model is fed would be accurate all the time and AI model will perform well (left). But in some cases, the AI may be given inaccurate data, causing it to miss its targets (middle). The new algorithm CARRL helps AIs account for uncertainty in its data inputs, yielding a better performance when relying on poor data (right).
Across all test scenarios, the RL model was better at compensating for potential inaccurate or “noisy” data with CARRL, than without CARRL.
But the results also show that, like with humans, too much self-doubt and uncertainty can be unhelpful. In the collision avoidance scenario, for example, indulging in too much uncertainty caused the main moving object in the simulation to avoid both the obstacle and its goal. “There is definitely a limit to how ‘skeptical’ the algorithm can be without becoming overly conservative,” Everett says.
This research was funded by Ford Motor Company, but Everett notes that it could be applicable under many other commercial applications requiring safety-aware AI, including aerospace, healthcare, or manufacturing domains.
“This work is a step toward my vision of creating ‘certifiable learning machines’—systems that can discover how to explore and perform in the real world on their own, while still having safety and robustness guarantees,” says Everett. “We'd like to bring CARRL into robotic hardware while continuing to explore the theoretical challenges at the interface of robotics and AI.” Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#438506 How humans can build better teamwork ...
As human interaction with robots and artificial intelligence increases exponentially in areas like healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, space exploration, defense technologies, information about how humans and autonomous systems work within teams remains scarce. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#438294 Video Friday: New Entertainment Robot ...
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):
HRI 2021 – March 8-11, 2021 – [Online Conference]
RoboSoft 2021 – April 12-16, 2021 – [Online Conference]
ICRA 2021 – May 30-5, 2021 – Xi'an, China
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
Engineered Arts' latest Mesmer entertainment robot is Cleo. It sings, gesticulates, and even does impressions.
[ Engineered Arts ]
I do not know what this thing is or what it's saying but Panasonic is going to be selling them and I will pay WHATEVER. IT. COSTS.
Slightly worrisome is that Google Translate persistently thinks that part of the description involves “sleeping and flatulence.”
[ Panasonic ] via [ RobotStart ]
Spot Enterprise is here to help you safely ignore every alarm that goes off at work while you're snug at home in your jammies drinking cocoa.
That Spot needs a bath.
If you missed the launch event (with more on the arm), check it out here:
[ Boston Dynamics ]
PHASA-35, a 35m wingspan solar-electric aircraft successfully completed its maiden flight in Australia, February 2020. Designed to operate unmanned in the stratosphere, above the weather and conventional air traffic, PHASA-35 offers a persistent and affordable alternative to satellites combined with the flexibility of an aircraft, which could be used for a range of valuable applications including forest fire detection and maritime surveillance.
[ BAE Systems ]
As part of the Army Research Lab’s (ARL) Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance (RCTA), we are developing new planning and control algorithms for quadrupedal robots. The goal of our project is to equip the robot LLAMA, developed by NASA JPL, with the skills it needs to move at operational tempo over difficult terrain to keep up with a human squad. This requires innovative perception, planning, and control techniques to make the robot both precise in execution for navigating technical obstacles and robust enough to reject disturbances and recover from unknown errors.
[ IHMC ]
Watch what happens to this drone when it tries to install a bird diverter on a high voltage power line:
[ GRVC ]
Soldiers navigate a wide variety of terrains to successfully complete their missions. As human/agent teaming and artificial intelligence advance, the same flexibility will be required of robots to maneuver across diverse terrain and become effective combat teammates.
[ Army ]
The goal of the GRIFFIN project is to create something similar to sort of robotic bird, which almost certainly won't look like this concept rendering.
While I think this research is great, at what point is it in fact easier to just, you know, train an actual bird?
[ GRIFFIN ]
Paul Newman narrates this video from two decades ago, which is a pretty neat trick.
[ Oxford Robotics Institute ]
The first step towards a LEGO-based robotic McMuffin creator is cracking and separating eggs.
[ Astonishing Studios ] via [ BB ]
Some interesting soft robotics projects at the University of Southern Denmark.
[ SDU ]
Chong Liu introduces Creature_02, his final presentation for Hod Lipson's Robotics Studio course at Columbia.
[ Chong Liu ]
The world needs more robot blimps.
[ Lab INIT Robots ]
Finishing its duty early, the KR CYBERTECH nano uses this time to play basketball.
[ Kuka ]
senseFly has a new aerial surveying drone that they call “affordable,” although they don't say what the price is.
[ senseFly ]
In summer 2020 participated several science teams of the ETH Zurich at the “Art Safiental” in the mountains of Graubunden. After the scientists packed their hiking gear and their robots, their only mission was “over hill and dale to the summit”. How difficult will it be to reach the summit with a legged robot and an exosceletton? What's the relation of synesthetic dance and robotic? How will the hikers react to these projects?
[ Rienerschnitzel Films ]
Thanks Robert!
Karen Liu: How robots perceive the physical world. A specialist in computer animation expounds upon her rapidly evolving specialty, known as physics-based simulation, and how it is helping robots become more physically aware of the world around them.
[ Stanford ]
This week's UPenn GRASP On Robotics seminar is by Maria Chiara Carrozza from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, on “Biorobotics for Personal Assistance – Translational Research and Opportunities for Human-Centered Developments.”
The seminar will focus on the opportunities and challenges offered by the digital transformation of healthcare which was accelerated in the COVID-19 Pandemia. In this framework rehabilitation and social robotics can play a fundamental role as enabling technologies for providing innovative therapies and services to patients even at home or in remote environments.
[ UPenn ] Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots