Monday, October 21, 2019

Does the Future of Robots Get You Excited, or Fill You With Dread? - The New York Times

Last week, a robotic hand successfully solved a Rubik's Cube. While that feat might seem like a fun parlor trick, it's a sign that robots are being programmed to learn and not just memorize.

Robots are already playing important roles inside retail giants like Amazon and manufacturing companies like Foxconn by completing very specific, repetitive tasks! Does the Future of Robots Get You Excited, or Fill You ...www.nytimes.com /2019/10/17/learning/ ...-excited...When you imagine the future of robots and artificial intelligence, do you get excited? Do you envision a world of benefits for humankind? Or does an automated future fill you with concern and fear ...!! But many believe that machine learning will ultimately allow robots to master a much wider array of more complex functions .

When you imagine the future of robots and artificial intelligence, do you get excited? Do you envision a world of benefits for humankind? Or does an automated future fill you with concern and fear?

In " If a Robotic Hand Solves a Rubik's Cube, Does It Prove Something? " Cade Metz writes about how this five-fingered feat could show important progress in A.I. research:

Date: 2019-10-17T09:00:09.241Z
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Quite a lot has been going on:

Realtime Robotics scores $11.7M Series A to help robots avoid collisions – TechCrunch

One of the major challenges facing engineers as they develop more agile robots is helping them move through space while avoiding collisions, especially in a dynamic environment! 21 Future Jobs the Robots Are Actually Creating | Inc.com www.inc.com ...robots ...Among these optimists are IT service company Cognizant. In a recent report (hat tip to Business Insider for the pointer), the consultancy notes that while creative destruction has always been with us, so has reinvention. Sure, robots will take jobs away, but they'll also create new ones.!! Realtime Robotics , a Boston-based startup, announced an $11.7 million Series A investment to help solve this problem.

SPARX Asset Management led the round, with participation from some strategic investors, including Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Hyundai Motor Company and Omron Ventures! The future of robotics: 10 predictions for 2017 and beyond ...www.zdnet.com /article/ ...of-robotics What does the future hold for robotics ?It's hard to say, given the rapid pace of change in the field as well as in associated areas such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.But one ...!! Existing investors Toyota AI Ventures, Scrum Ventures and the Duke Angel Network also pitched in. Today’s investment is actually the culmination of a couple of investments over this year that the company is announcing today, and brings the total raised to $12.9 million.

Realtime Robotics CEO Peter Howard says the company’s solutions are grounded in advanced research on robotic motion planning. “We are based on research work done at Duke University in 2016 in the field of work called robotic motion planning, which is basically how a six or seven degree of freedom robot finds its way through space without hitting anything,” Howard told TechCrunch.

Publisher: TechCrunch
Date: 2019-10-16 07:00:22
Twitter: @techcrunch
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MIT develops a way for robots to grasp and manipulate objects much faster – TechCrunch

Picking stuff up seems easy, right? It is — for humans with powerful brain computers that instantly and intuitively figure out everything needed to get the job done. But for robots, even advanced robots, the compute required is surprisingly complex, especially if you want the robot to not, you know, break the thing it’s grabbing.

MIT has developed a new way to speed up the planning involved in a robot grasping an object, making it “significantly” faster — reducing the total time from as much as 10 or more minutes to less than a second! What Does the Future of Collaborative Robots Look Like ...www. robotics ...Does - ...Robots ...The future of collaborative robots is bright. The market is projected to grow rapidly in the short-term, driven by the fact that collaborative robots can quickly and cost effectively address manufacturers most pressing problems. In addition to this robust market growth, collaborative robot ...!! That’s many orders of magnitude better, bringing it closer to the realm of human reaction and response time.

This could have big practical benefits to settings where robotics are already in use, including industrial environments! Will Robots Ever Have Emotions? | Psychology Today www.psychologytoday.com ...have-emotions To be emotional like people, robots need bodies, appraisals, and culture. Humans have emotions such as happiness, sadness, fear, and anger; and maybe other animals have them too. Robots are getting increasingly smarter, for example, the driverless cars that are now navigating city streets.!! The research team’s method involves having the robot push the object against a surface that doesn’t move, which allows it to shortcut a bunch of the decision-making process about how to manipulate it. That could be applied in picking and sorting applications, which is a common enough use for robots on factory floors and in warehouses.

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Publisher: TechCrunch
Date: 2019-10-17 09:08:32
Twitter: @techcrunch
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Student-made robots compete at Pleasant Grove High School | Modesto Bee

The student-made robots at this year’s Capital City Classic FIRST robot-building competition duked it out Sunday in Elk Grove at the Pleasant Grove High School gym, scoring points against each other by dropping bouncy orange balls into bins and festooning designated panels with thin plastic discs.

FIRST – which stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology , an organization founded in 1989 to promote youth interest in STEM fields – holds regional engineering contests that pit student engineers against each other, and this year’s Capital City Classic contest included more than 40 teams from California.

The competition featured robots built by the host school, as well as local high schools Cosumnes Oaks and Davis.

The Davis-based Citrus Circuits , Team 1678, has been participating in competitions since 2005, head coach Steve Harvey said. Students begin their robot building season in January, when FIRST announces the kinds of games that will appear at contests, he said.

Publisher: modbee
Twitter: @modbee
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Other things to check out:

Robot hand solving Rubik's Cube is one step closer to robots that can solve problems without

Harder still: designing a lone robot hand capable of solving a Rubik's Cube all by itself. Such a machine would require unprecedented dexterity and coordinated finger joint movements, as well as the ability to learn a new task over time and independently the way a human would.

This week, researchers at OpenAI — a well-known San Francisco-based research lab focused on developing benevolent artificial intelligence — announced they had done just that, setting a new robotics benchmark in an era of increasingly sophisticated, intelligent machines.

In a statement hailing their achievement, researchers said the robotic hand, which they've called "Dactyl," moves robots one step closer to "human-level dexterity."

"Solving a Rubik's Cube requires unprecedented dexterity and the ability to execute flawlessly or recover from mistakes successfully for a long period of time," the statement said. "Even for humans, solving a Rubik's Cube one-handed is no simple task — there are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 ways to scramble a Rubik's Cube."

Publisher: Washington Post
Twitter: @WashingtonPost
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Assembler robots make large structures from little pieces | MIT News

Photo shows two prototype assembler robots at work putting together a series of small units, known as voxels, into a larger structure.

* * *

Sequence of photos shows an assembler robot at work, carrying one structural unit over the top and down the other side of a structure under construction.

Today's commercial aircraft are typically manufactured in sections, often in different locations — wings at one factory, fuselage sections at another, tail components somewhere else — and then flown to a central plant in huge cargo planes for final assembly.

But what if the final assembly was the only assembly, with the whole plane built out of a large array of tiny identical pieces, all put together by an army of tiny robots?

That's the vision that graduate student Benjamin Jenett, working with Professor Neil Gershenfeld in MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), has been pursuing as his doctoral thesis work. It's now reached the point that prototype versions of such robots can assemble small structures and even work together as a team to build up a larger assemblies.

Publisher: MIT News
Author: David L Chandler MIT News Office
Twitter: @mit
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