Tag Archives: researchers
#438998 Foam Sword Fencing With a PR2 Is the ...
Most of what we cover in the Human Robot Interaction (HRI) space involves collaboration, because collaborative interactions tend to be productive, positive, and happy. Yay! But sometimes, collaboration is not what you want. Sometimes, you want competition.
Competition between humans and robots doesn’t have to be a bad thing, in the same way that competition between humans and humans doesn’t have to be a bad thing. There are all kinds of scenarios in which humans respond favorably to competition, and exercise is an obvious example.
Studies have shown that humans can perform significantly better when they’re exercising competitively as opposed to when they’re exercising individually. And while researchers have looked at whether robots can be effective exercise coaches (they can be), there hasn’t been a lot of exploration of physical robots actually competing directly with humans. Roboticists from the University of Washington decided to put adversarial exercise robots to the test, and they did it by giving a PR2 a giant foam sword. Awesome.
This exercise game matches a PR2 with a human in a zero-sum competitive fencing game with foam swords. Expecting the PR2 to actually be a competitive fencer isn’t realistic because, like, it’s a PR2. Instead, the objective of the game is for the human to keep their foam sword within a target area near the PR2 while also avoiding the PR2’s low-key sword-waving. A VR system allows the user to see the target area, while also giving the system a way to track the user’s location and pose.
Looks like fun, right? It’s also exercise, at least in the sense that the user’s heart rate nearly doubled over their resting heart rate during the highest scoring game. This is super preliminary research, though, and there’s still a lot of work to do. It’ll be important to figure out how skilled a competitive robot should be in order to keep providing a reasonable challenge to a human who gradually improves over time, while also being careful to avoid generating any negative reactions. For example, the robot should probably not beat you over the head with its foam sword, even if that’s a highly effective strategy for getting your heart rate up.
Competitive Physical Human-Robot Game Play, by Boling Yang, Xiangyu Xie, Golnaz Habibi, and Joshua R. Smith from the University of Washington and MIT, was presented as a late-breaking report at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. Continue reading
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#438925 Nanophotonics Could Be the ‘Dark ...
The race to build the first practical quantum computers looks like a two-horse contest between machines built from superconducting qubits and those that use trapped ions. But new research suggests a third contender—machines based on optical technology—could sneak up on the inside.
The most advanced quantum computers today are the ones built by Google and IBM, which rely on superconducting circuits to generate the qubits that form the basis of quantum calculations. They are now able to string together tens of qubits, and while controversial, Google claims its machines have achieved quantum supremacy—the ability to carry out a computation beyond normal computers.
Recently this approach has been challenged by a wave of companies looking to use trapped ion qubits, which are more stable and less error-prone than superconducting ones. While these devices are less developed, engineering giant Honeywell has already released a machine with 10 qubits, which it says is more powerful than a machine made of a greater number of superconducting qubits.
But despite this progress, both of these approaches have some major drawbacks. They require specialized fabrication methods, incredibly precise control mechanisms, and they need to be cooled to close to absolute zero to protect the qubits from any outside interference.
That’s why researchers at Canadian quantum computing hardware and software startup Xanadu are backing an alternative quantum computing approach based on optics, which was long discounted as impractical. In a paper published last week in Nature, they unveiled the first fully programmable and scalable optical chip that can run quantum algorithms. Not only does the system run at room temperature, but the company says it could scale to millions of qubits.
The idea isn’t exactly new. As Chris Lee notes in Ars Technica, people have been experimenting with optical approaches to quantum computing for decades, because encoding information in photons’ quantum states and manipulating those states is relatively easy. The biggest problem was that optical circuits were very large and not readily programmable, which meant you had to build a new computer for every new problem you wanted to solve.
That started to change thanks to the growing maturity of photonic integrated circuits. While early experiments with optical computing involved complex table-top arrangements of lasers, lenses, and detectors, today it’s possible to buy silicon chips not dissimilar to electronic ones that feature hundreds of tiny optical components.
In recent years, the reliability and performance of these devices has improved dramatically, and they’re now regularly used by the telecommunications industry. Some companies believe they could be the future of artificial intelligence too.
This allowed the Xanadu researchers to design a silicon chip that implements a complex optical network made up of beam splitters, waveguides, and devices called interferometers that cause light sources to interact with each other.
The chip can generate and manipulate up to eight qubits, but unlike conventional qubits, which can simultaneously be in two states, these qubits can be in any configuration of three states, which means they can carry more information.
Once the light has travelled through the network, it is then fed out to cutting-edge photon-counting detectors that provide the result. This is one of the potential limitations of the system, because currently these detectors need to be cryogenically cooled, although the rest of the chip does not.
But most importantly, the chip is easily re-programmable, which allows it to tackle a variety of problems. The computation can be controlled by adjusting the settings of these interferometers, but the researchers have also developed a software platform that hides the physical complexity from users and allows them to program it using fairly conventional code.
The company announced that its chips were available on the cloud in September of 2020, but the Nature paper is the first peer-reviewed test of their system. The researchers verified that the computations being done were genuinely quantum mechanical in nature, but they also implemented two more practical algorithms: one for simulating molecules and the other for judging how similar two graphs are, which has applications in a variety of pattern recognition problems.
In an accompanying opinion piece, Ulrik Andersen from the Technical University of Denmark says the quality of the qubits needs to be improved considerably and photon losses reduced if the technology is ever to scale to practical problems. But, he says, this breakthrough suggests optical approaches “could turn out to be the dark horse of quantum computing.”
Image Credit: Shahadat Rahman on Unsplash Continue reading
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