Imperial College London Stanford Lund University
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Alexandros Kogkas, Katie Driggs-Campbell, and Martin Karlsson about the work they presented at the 2018 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in Madrid, Spain.
In February we asked for input from the robotics community regarding a potential Robotics Flagship, a pan European interdisciplinary effort with 1B EUR in funding, if successful! The goal of the flagship is to drive the development of future robots and AIs that are ethically, socially, economically, energetically, and environmentally responsible and sustainable.
Eleni Vasilaki, Professor of Computational Neuroscience, University of Sheffield
Should we be afraid of artificial intelligence? For me, this is a simple question with an even simpler, two letter answer: no. But not everyone agrees – many people, including the late physicist Stephen Hawking, have raised concerns that the rise of powerful AI systems could spell the end for humanity.
In this episode of Robots in Depth, Per Sjöborg speaks with Richard Voyles about rescue robotics and advising politicians about robotics.
This week a Harvard Business School student challenged me to name a startup capable of producing an intelligent robot – TODAY! At first I did not understand the question, as artificial intelligence (AI) is an implement like any other in a roboticist’s toolbox. The student persisted, she demanded to know if I thought that the current co-bots working in factories could one day evolve to perceive the world like humans. It’s a good question that I didn’t appreciate at the time as robots are best deployed for specific repeatable tasks, even with deep learning systems. By contrast, mortals comprehend their surroundings (and other organisms) using a sixth sense, intuition.
A crucial task for energy providers is the reliable and safe operation of their plants, especially when producing energy offshore. Autonomous mobile robots are able to offer comprehensive support through regular and automated inspection of machinery and infrastructure. In a world’s first pilot installation, transmission system operator TenneT tested the autonomous legged robot ANYmal on one of the world’s largest offshore converter platforms in the North Sea.
MIT researchers describe an autonomous system for a fleet of drones to collaboratively search under dense forest canopies using only onboard computation and wireless communication — no GPS required.
Images: Melanie Gonick
By Rob Matheson
Finding lost hikers in forests can be a difficult and lengthy process, as helicopters and drones can’t get a glimpse through the thick tree canopy. Recently, it’s been proposed that autonomous drones, which can bob and weave through trees, could aid these searches. But the GPS signals used to guide the aircraft can be unreliable or nonexistent in forest environments.
Photo: MIT News
By Rob Matheson
Children learn language by observing their environment, listening to the people around them, and connecting the dots between what they see and hear. Among other things, this helps children establish their language’s word order, such as where subjects and verbs fall in a sentence.
In this episode of Robots in Depth, Per Sjöborg speaks with Stefano Stramigioli about the Robotics and Mechatronics lab he leads at University of Twente. The lab focuses on inspection and maintenance robotics, as well as medical applications.
A recent Reuters story suggests Cruise is well behind schedule with one insider saying “nothing is on schedule” and various reports of problems not yet handled. This puts doubt into GM’s announced plan to have a commercial pilot without safety drivers in operation in San Francisco in 2019.
As part of the “SeRoDi” project (“Service Robotics for Personal Services”), Fraunhofer IPA collaborated with other research and application partners to develop new service robotics solutions for the nursing sector. The resulting robots, the “intelligent care cart” and the “robotic service assistant”, were used in extensive real-world trials in a hospital and at two care homes.
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Caitlyn Clabaugh, PhD Candidate at the University of Southern California, about lessons learned about putting robots in people’s homes for human-robot interaction research. Clabaugh speaks about her work to date, the expectations in human-subjects research, and gives general advice for PhD students.
By Daniel Seita, Jeff Mahler, Mike Danielczuk, Matthew Matl, and Ken Goldberg
This post explores two independent innovations and the potential for combining them in robotics. Two years before the AlexNet results on ImageNet were released in 2012, Microsoft rolled out the Kinect for the X-Box. This class of low-cost depth sensors emerged just as Deep Learning boosted Artificial Intelligence by accelerating performance of hyper-parametric function approximators leading to surprising advances in image classification, speech recognition, and language translation.
In this episode of Robots in Depth, Per Sjöborg speaks Sebastian Weisenburger about how ECHORD++ works, with application-oriented research bridging academia, industry and end users to bring robots to market, under the banner “From lab to market”.
Image: Felice Frankel
By David L. Chandler
Tiny robots no bigger than a cell could be mass-produced using a new method developed by researchers at MIT. The microscopic devices, which the team calls “syncells” (short for synthetic cells), might eventually be used to monitor conditions inside an oil or gas pipeline, or to search out disease while floating through the bloodstream.
