Lifeboat Foundation

In a global first, scientists have demonstrated that molecular robots are able to accomplish cargo delivery by employing a strategy of swarming, achieving a transport efficiency five times greater than that of single robots.

Swarm robotics is a new discipline, inspired by the cooperative behavior of living organisms, that focuses on the fabrication of robots and their utilization in swarms to accomplish complex tasks. A swarm is an orderly collective behavior of multiple individuals. Macro-scale swarm robots have been developed and employed for a variety of applications, such as transporting and accumulating cargo, forming shapes, and building complex structures.

A team of researchers, led by Dr. Mousumi Akter and Associate Professor Akira Kakugo from the Faculty of Science at Hokkaido University, has succeeded in developing the world’s first working micro-sized machines utilizing the advantages of swarming. The findings were published in the journal Science Robotics. The team included Assistant Professor Daisuke Inoue, Kyushu University; Professor Henry Hess, Columbia University; Professor Hiroyuki Asanuma, Nagoya University; and Professor Akinori Kuzuya, Kansai University.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed that the automaker has now more than 100,000 people in its Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta program.

Does it mean that we are going to start seeing an accelerated rate of improvement?

FSD Beta has been a “two steps forward, one step back” type of program.

Nvidia is impressed with the chip making capabilities of NVCell, its AI chip designer. The firm says that it using it, just two GPUs can do nearly the same work that takes ten people a year’s time.

AI brings many benefits but as with any rapidly advancing technology it needs ethical frameworks that protect society, in particular children and young people.

The processing of food at high volumes has traditionally posed many problems for robots and cobots, and has lagged behind other industries. Foods have a variety of shapes and sizes and can be delicate in nature. These variables can be challenging when a robot tries to grasp an item. The delicate often has strict requirements for quality, making them even harder to grasp (think: strawberries).

Non-automotive robot orders now represent 58% of the North American total. Unit sales to the food and consumer goods sector alone increased 29% in 2021 over 2020, according to Association for Advancing Automation (A3).

“More industries recognized that robotics could help reverse productivity declines and fill repetitive jobs human workers don’t want. It is no longer a choice whether to deploy robots and automation,” says Jeff Burnstein, president of A3. “It’s now an absolute imperative. As we’ve long believed—and users continue to confirm—robots help companies compete, ultimately creating more jobs to handle their growth.”

Materials scientists aim to develop biomimetic soft robotic crawlers including earthworm-like and inchworm-like crawlers to realize locomotion via in-plane and out-of-plane contractions for a variety of engineering applications. While such devices can show effective motion in confined spaces, it is challenging to miniaturize the concept due to complex and limited actuation. In a new report now published in Science Advances, Qiji Ze and a team of scientists in mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering at Stanford University and the Ohio State University, U.S., described a magnetically actuated, small-scale origami crawler exhibiting in-plane contraction. The team achieved contraction mechanisms via a four-unit Kresling origami assembly to facilitate the motion of an untethered robot with crawling or steering capacity. The crawler overcame large resistances in severely confined spaces due to its magnetically tunable structural stiffness and anisotropy. The setup provided a contraption for drug storage and release with potential to serve as a minimally invasive device in biomedicine.

Navigating complicated terrains

Bioinspired crawling motion shows adaptation to complicated terrains due to its soft deformable dimensions. Researchers aim to engineer crawling for a variety of applications in limited or confined environments, including extraterrestrial exploration, tube inspection, and gastrointestinal endoscopy. Origami provides an appropriate method to generate contraction relative to structural folding, which can be adapted to engineer robotic crawlers. The team described Kresling patterns; a specific type of bioinspired, origami pattern used to generate axial contraction under torque or compressive force, coupled with a twist from the relative rotation of the device units. Ze et al illustrated a magnetically actuated small-scale origami crawler to induce effective in-plane crawling motions. The scientists developed a four-unit Kresling assembly and verified torque distribution on the crawler using finite element analysis to induce motion.

When artificial intelligence systems encounter scenes where objects are not fully visible, they have to make estimations based only on the visible parts of the objects. This partial information leads to detection errors, and large training data is required to correctly recognize such scenes. Now, researchers at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology have developed a framework that allows robot vision to detect such objects successfully in the same way that we perceive them.

Robotic vision has come a long way, reaching a level of sophistication with applications in complex and demanding tasks, such as autonomous driving and object manipulation. However, it still struggles to identify individual objects in cluttered scenes where some objects are partially or completely hidden behind others. Typically, when dealing with such scenes, robotic vision systems are trained to identify the occluded object based only on its visible parts. But such training requires large datasets of objects and can be pretty tedious.

Associate Professor Kyoobin Lee and Ph.D. student Seunghyeok Back from the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) in Korea found themselves facing this problem when they were developing an artificial intelligence system to identify and sort objects in cluttered scenes. “We expect a robot to recognize and manipulate objects they have not encountered before or been trained to recognize. In reality, however, we need to manually collect and label data one by one as the generalizability of deep neural networks depends highly on the quality and quantity of the training dataset,” says Mr. Back.

Phishing attacks are cyber-attacks through which criminals trick users into sending them money and sensitive information, or into installing malware on their computer, by sending them deceptive emails or messages. As these attacks have become increasingly widespread, developers have been trying to develop more advanced tools to detect them and protect potential victims.

Researchers at Monash University and CSIRO’s Data61 in Australia have recently developed a machine learning-based approach that could help users to identify phishing emails, so that they don’t inadvertently install malware or send sensitive data to cyber-criminals. This model was introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv and set to be presented at AsiaCCS 2022, a cyber-security conference.

“We have identified a gap in current phishing research, namely realizing that existing literature focuses on rigorous ‘black and white’ methods to classify whether something is a phishing email or not,” Tingmin (Tina) Wu, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore.

Safety avionics specialist Iris Automation has made a meteorological enhancement to its Casia G ground-based surveillance system with the integration of TruWeather Solutions sensors and services – a move aiming to add climate security to the company’s aerial detect-and-avoid protection.

Addition of a precision weather utility was a natural step in Iris Automation’s wider objective of ensuring flight safety of, and between, crewed aircraft and drones The company says local micro weather and low-altitude atmospheric conditions often differ considerably from those at higher levels. That differential creates a larger degree of weather uncertainty for aerial service providers, who weigh safety factors heavily into whether they make flights as planned or not.