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Category: robotics/AI – Page 1516

Once studied by Charles Darwin, the Venus flytrap is perhaps the most famous plant that moves at high speed. But as Daniel Rayneau-Kirkhope explains, researchers are still unearthing new scientific insights into plant motion, which could lead to novel, bio-inspired robotic structures.

“In the absence of any other proof,” Isaac Newton is once said to have proclaimed, “the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.” With 29 bones, 123 ligaments and 34 muscles pulling the strings, the human hand is indeed a feat of nature’s engineering. It lets us write, touch, hold, feel and interact in exquisite detail with the world around us.

To replicate the wonders of the human hand, researchers in the field of “soft robotics” are trying to design artificial structures made from flexible, compliant materials that can be controlled and programmed by computers. Trouble is, the hand is such a complex structure that it needs lots of computing power to be properly controlled. That’s a problem when developing prosthetic hands for people who have lost an arm in, say, an accident or surgery.

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Timestamps:

0:00 How the Rose lab more than doubled the lifespan of Drosophila.
17:20 Use of machine learning (ML) and multi-‘omics to characterize aging, and use of ML to develop interventions.
37:04 Adherence to an ancestral diet in Drosophila extends healthspan relative to their evolutionary recent diet.
40:35 The importance of measuring objective markers of health to determine if one’s diet is best for them.
44:04 Does aging stop, and use of biomarker testing to help decipher/optimize that.
53:33 The importance of characterizing aging for both Drosophila and its co-associated microbiome.
1:00:35 Why a massive, wide-scale, Manhattan-project approach for increasing human lifespan is necessary.

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The “show” starts with a robot grabbing a handful of dough and depositing it on a pan, where another bot flattens it, a third applies tomato sauce, etc. From dough-grabbing to inserting in the oven, preparing a pizza takes just 45 seconds. The oven can bake 6 pizzas at a time, yielding about 80 pizzas per hour. Once a pizza is baked to gooey perfection, a robot slices it and places it in a box, and it’s then transferred (by a robot, of course) to a numbered cubby from which the customer can retrieve it.

It’s a shame the pizzeria didn’t open during the height of the pandemic, as its revenues likely would have gone through the roof given that there’s zero person-to-person contact required for you to get a fresh, custom-made pizza in your hands (and more importantly, your belly!).

Pazzi’s creators spent eight years researching and developing the pizza bots, and they say the hardest part was getting the bots to work effectively with the raw dough. Since it’s made with yeast, the dough is sensitive to changes in temperature, humidity, and other factors, and for optimal results it needs to be rolled out and baked with very precise timing.

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You don’t need to be a roboticist to make Spot dance. Learn how Spot’s Choreographer software and athletic intelligence bridge the gap between the creative and the technical process. https://bit.ly/36xIbkA

Bringing It All Together

These different approaches to authoring dance sequences can be combined and layered in Choreographer to create the intricate results showcased in the “Spot’s On It” video. For example, in the “Ripples” sequence with seven Spots performing a wave-like dance, we used both animation and standard Choreographer workflows. We set the steps and body positions with stock move blocks, but wanted a more fluid effect in the arm motions. Animation allowed us to get precisely the desired arm movement, while the layering framework enabled us to combine the animated arm motion with the stock moves, resulting in the best of both worlds.

Continue reading “In Step with Spot” | >

The ‘ModiPwn’ bug lays open production lines, sensors, conveyor belts, elevators, HVACs and more that use Schneider Electric PLCs.

A critical remote code-execution (RCE) vulnerability in Schneider Electric programmable logic controllers (PLCs) has come to light, which allows unauthenticated cyberattackers to gain root-level control over PLCs used in manufacturing, building automation, healthcare and enterprise environments.

If exploited, attackers could impact production lines, sensors and conveyor belts in factory settings, according to the researchers at Armis who discovered the bug – as well as affect devices familiar to the everyday consumer, such as elevators, HVACs and other automated devices.

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When we think about singularities, we tend to think of massive black holes in faraway galaxies or a distant future with runaway AI, but singularities are all around us. Singularities are simply a place where certain parameters are undefined. The North and South Pole, for example, are what’s known as coordinate singularities because they don’t have a defined longitude.

Optical singularities typically occur when the phase of with a specific wavelength, or color, is undefined. These regions appear completely dark. Today, some optical singularities, including optical vortices, are being explored for use in optical communications and particle manipulation but scientists are just beginning to understand the potential of these systems. The question remains—can we harness darkness like we harnessed light to build powerful, new technologies?

Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a new way to control and optical singularities. The technique can be used to engineer singularities of many shapes, far beyond simple curved or straight lines. To demonstrate their technique, the researchers created a singularity sheet in the shape of a heart.

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“You can also engineer dead zones in radio waves or silent zones in acoustic waves,” said Lim. “This research points to the possibility of designing complex topologies in wave physics beyond optics, from electron beams to acoustics.”

When we think about singularities, we tend to think of massive black holes in faraway galaxies or a distant future with runaway AI, but singularities are all around us. Singularities are simply a place where certain parameters are undefined. The North and South Pole, for example, are what’s known as coordinate singularities because they don’t have a defined longitude.

Optical singularities typically occur when the phase of light with a specific wavelength, or color, is undefined. These regions appear completely dark. Today, some optical singularities, including optical vortices, are being explored for use in optical communications and particle manipulation but scientists are just beginning to understand the potential of these systems. The question remains — can we harness darkness like we harnessed light to build powerful, new technologies?

Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a new way to control and shape optical singularities. The technique can be used to engineer singularities of many shapes, far beyond simple curved or straight lines. To demonstrate their technique, the researchers created a singularity sheet in the shape of a heart.

Continue reading “Harnessing the Dark Side: Optical Singularities Could Be Used for a Wide Range of Applications” | >