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Category: robotics/AI – Page 1,479

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, in collaboration with TCS Research and Wageningen University, recently devised a new strategy that could improve coordination among different robots tackling complex missions as a team. This strategy, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, is based on a split-architecture that addresses communication and computations separately, while periodically coordinating the two to achieve optimal results.

The researchers’ paper was recently presented at the IEEE RoboCom 2022 conference, held in conjunction with IEEE CCNC 2022, a top tier conference in the field of networking and distributed computing. At IEEE RoboCom 2022, it received the Best Paper Award.

“Swarm-robotics is on the path to becoming a key tool for human civilization,” Dr. Sudipta Saha, the lead researcher of the team that carried out the study, told TechXplore. “For instance, in medical science, it will be necessary to use numerous nano-bots to boost immune-therapy, targeted and effective drug transfer, etc.; while in the army it will be necessary for exploring unknown terrains that are hard for humans to enter, enabling agile supervision of borders and similar activities. In construction, it can enable technologies such as large-scale 3D printing and in agriculture it can help to monitor crop health and intervene to improve yields.”

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Suspended beneath a thick canopy of trees, the sloth inches along with slow strides. Painfully slow. Intentionally slow. Crawling high up among the branches, traipsing along a 100-foot steel cable, the little creature is like a lethargic acrobat. But its goal is not to delight or to put on a show; in fact, just the opposite. This sloth is all about stealth, observation, and collecting as much sunlight as possible.

After all, this is a solar-powered robot.

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Parkour is not for the weak-hearted. Luckily, the two latest freerunning champs don’t have a heart at all because, you know, they’re robots.

In a YouTube video released Tuesday, Boston Dynamics—the Waltham, Massachusetts-based robotics company known for its viral clips of machines performing surprisingly human activities—shows off two humanoid robots (both named Atlas) performing the leaps, bounds, and backflips required to complete a parkour course.

The first robot hops across wooden ramps, climbs stairs, and jumps across several-foot-wide chasms between obstacles before a second robot picks up the routine, running across a balance beam à la Simone Biles. By the end of the video, the robots have hopped over pieces of the course as you might leap over a fence, performed backflips in sync, and even dusted off their shoulders like it’s nothing.

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Adding to its space program’s growing list of achievements.

China’s space program (CNSA) is the first to detect water signals directly from the Moon’s surface thanks to its Chang’e-5 lunar probe, a report from CGTN reveals.

The new breakthrough provides yet another important milestone for the CNSA, which is ambitiously closing the gap between itself and the world’s two historic space superpowers, the U.S. and Russia.

The first in-situ lunar water detection For years, thanks to a number of orbital observations and sample measurements, it has been known that water exists on the Moon. In fact, last year a California-based startup called Masten Space Systems announced it is developing a robotic rover that can mine ice on the Moon to provide future lunar habitats with water and oxygen.

Full Story:

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We are currently witnessing an explosion of network traffic. Numerous emerging services and applications, such as cloud services, video streaming platforms and the Internet of Things (IOT), are further increasing the demand for high-capacity communications. Optical communication systems, technologies that transfer information optically using fibers, are the backbone of today’s communication networks of fixed-line, wireless infrastructure and data centers.

Over the past decade, the growth of the internet was enabled by a technique known as digital signal processing (DSP), which can help to reduce transmission distortions. However, DSP is currently implemented using CMOS integrated circuits (ICs), thus it relies heavily on Moore’s Law, which has approached its limits in terms of power dissipation, density and feasible engineering solutions.

As a result, distortions caused by a phenomenon known as fiber nonlinearity cannot be compensated by DSP, as this would require too much computation power and resources. Fiber nonlinearities remain the major limiting effect on long-distance transmission systems.

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This article was contributed by Valerias Bangert, strategy and innovation consultant, founder of three media outlets, and published author.

AI job automation: The debate

The debate around whether AI will automate jobs away is heating up. AI critics claim that these statistical models lack the creativity and intuition of human workers and that they are thus doomed to specific, repetitive tasks. However, this pessimism fundamentally underestimates the power of AI. While AI job automation has already replaced around 400,000 factory jobs in the U.S. from 1990 to 2007, with another 2 million on the way, AI today is automating the economy in a much more subtle way.

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