Can we learn robot manipulation for everyday tasks, only by watching videos of humans doing arbitrary tasks in different unstructured settings? Unlike widely adopted strategies of learning task-specific behaviors or direct imitation of a human video, we develop a a framework for extracting agent-agnostic action representations from human videos, and then map it to the agent’s embodiment during deployment. Our framework is based on predicting plausible human hand trajectories given an initial image of a scene. After training this prediction model on a diverse set of human videos from the internet, we deploy the trained model zero-shot for physical robot manipulation tasks, after appropriate transformations to the robot’s embodiment. This simple strategy lets us solve coarse manipulation tasks like opening and closing drawers, pushing, and tool use, without access to any in-domain robot manipulation trajectories. Our real-world deployment results establish a strong baseline for action prediction information that can be acquired from diverse arbitrary videos of human activities, and be useful for zero-shot robotic manipulation in unseen scenes.
Archive for the ‘internet’ category: Page 40
Sep 4, 2023
2060’s New Nanotechnology — Molecular Assemblers
Posted by Dan Breeden in categories: education, internet, nanotechnology, particle physics
These all-purpose, desktop machines can reproduce a seemingly infinite variety of items. In fact, they are like miniature factories. In appearance, they resemble a combined washing machine/microwave oven. Raw materials are purchased separately and can be loaded in solid, liquid or powder form. An interior compartment is accessed via a small hatch, where objects are constructed atom-by-atom. The process takes a matter of minutes and the assembled items can be used immediately. New schematics can be accessed from the web and programmed into the machine.
I did not create this animation video and i do not gain any profit from it. This is for educational purposes only.
I HOPE YOU ENJOY.
Sep 3, 2023
The ‘90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president
Posted by Shubham Ghosh Roy in category: internet
“When checking the system this morning, I noticed your account logged in for over 20 hours,” begins a December 1998 email from the president of my dial-up Internet service provider (ISP) at the time. “Our service is unlimited, but we ask that you actually be using the connection while logged in.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself—why do I have an email from 1998?
Sep 3, 2023
August 25th Marks the Dawn of a Global Internet Extreme Censorship Era
Posted by Saúl Morales Rodriguéz in categories: internet, law
The Internet just changed forever, but most people living in the United States don’t even realize what just happened. A draconian new law known as the “Digital Services Act” went into effect in the European Union on Friday, and it establishes an extremely strict regime of Internet censorship that is far more authoritarian than anything we have ever seen before.
From this point forward, hordes of European bureaucrats will be the arbiters of what is acceptable to say on the Internet. If they discover something that you have said on a large online platform that they do not like, they can force that platform to take it down, because someone in Europe might see it. So even though this is a European law, the truth is that it is going to have a tremendous impact on all of us.
Sep 2, 2023
NASA and SpaceX Plan Starship Low Earth Orbit Space Station Design Review in 2028
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: internet, space travel
NASA Commercial Space Capabilities office and SpaceX have a 24 page agreed plan to develop the SpaceX starship into a low earth orbit space station design by 2028. This is unfunded and aspirational. The parties will cooperate to try and make it happen. SpaceX with successful Starlink commercial services will have the funds to make this happen.
There are many other milestones that NASA and SpaceX are trying to achieve with Starship.
It will take another 2–4 years to actually launch the Starship space station.
Sep 2, 2023
An energy-efficient object detection system for UAVs based on edge computing
Posted by Saúl Morales Rodriguéz in categories: drones, internet, robotics/AI
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are already used in countless settings to tackle real-world problems. These flying robotic systems can, among other things, help to monitor natural environments, detect fires or other environmental hazards, monitor cities and find survivors of natural disasters.
To tackle all of these missions effectively, UAVs should be able to reliably detect targets and objects of interest in their surroundings. Computer scientists have thus been trying to devise new computational techniques that could enable these capabilities, using deep learning or other approaches.
Researchers at Yunnan University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences recently introduced a new object-detection system based on edge computing. Their proposed system, introduced in the IEEE Internet of Things Journal, could provide UAVs with the ability to spot relevant objects and targets in their surroundings without significantly increasing their power-consumption.
Sep 2, 2023
SpaceX Just 30 Launches Away From 2023 Goal As Musk Lauds Remarkable Milestone
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: Elon Musk, internet, satellites
Elon Musk’s rocket manufacturing company SpaceX has completed 60 launches this year, much to the CEO’s excitement.
What Happened: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched 22 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Florida on Thursday at about 10:21 p.m. ET, marking the company’s 60th launch this year.
“Congrats to the SpaceX team on launch 60 of 2023!” Musk wrote.
Sep 1, 2023
DeepMind’s ChatGPT-Like Brain for Robots Lets Them Learn From the Internet
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: internet, robotics/AI
Examples the team gives include choosing an object to use as a hammer when there’s no hammer available (the robot chooses a rock) and picking the best drink for a tired person (the robot chooses an energy drink).
“RT-2 shows improved generalization capabilities and semantic and visual understanding beyond the robotic data it was exposed to,” the researchers wrote in a Google blog post. “This includes interpreting new commands and responding to user commands by performing rudimentary reasoning, such as reasoning about object categories or high-level descriptions.”
The dream of general-purpose robots that can help humans with whatever may come up—whether in a home, a commercial setting, or an industrial setting—won’t be achievable until robots can learn on the go. What seems like the most basic instinct to us is, for robots, a complex combination of understanding context, being able to reason through it, and taking actions to solve problems that weren’t anticipated to pop up. Programming them to react appropriately to a variety of unplanned scenarios is impossible, so they need to be able to generalize and learn from experience, just like humans do.
Sep 1, 2023
SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches Starlink 6–13 Mission
Posted by Eric Klien in categories: climatology, internet, policy, satellites
For the first time in my timezone, SpaceX completed 9 launches in a month. Previously, if you were based in Europe, you saw 9 launches in a month a few months ago. At 9 launches/month that is a current rate of 108 launches/year, making SpaceX’s goal of 100 launches this year a possibility.
They had a lot of trouble getting this flight off today as a recent hurricane is still affecting the weather some. They got around this by having a 5 and a half hour launch window so they just waited a few hours until the weather was clear for several minutes and they launched!
Continue reading “SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches Starlink 6-13 Mission” »
Aug 31, 2023
What is Digital Sociology?
Posted by Kelvin Dafiaghor in categories: internet, robotics/AI
Digital sociology explores the interplay between digital technology, social behaviors, and societal structures. As an emerging discipline, it delves into how online interactions, social media platforms, and digital tools shape and reflect cultural dynamics, personal identities, and group norms. Digital sociologists analyze trends in cyber communities, the implications of digital data collection, and the broader impact of the internet on social evolution.
In this age of rapid technological advancement — where we find ourselves in the midst of a Digital Revolution and most recently, in an AI Revolution, the fast-spinning changes in society require analysis and understanding. Digital sociology provides critical insights into the multifaceted relationship between technology and the fabric of society.