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.
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.
At CES 2022, Hyundai reveals its vision for the future, which merges the metaverse with physical robotics.
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Japanese are increasingly turning to “social robots”, John Deere’s latest self-driving tractor will enable autonomous farming, a new South Australian craft beer has been designed entirely by AI.
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.
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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.
Posted in robotics/AI
Areas like deep learning and large language models are set to be high on the AI research agenda this year.
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.
Recharging Drones in only 45 minutes.
Recently, Autel Robotics released a new drone charging platform that allows drones to take on multiple recursive missions independent of weather across a wide variety of industrial applications, including industrial energy inspection, natural disaster monitoring, and more.
But another tilt-rotor VTOL drone from Autel can transition to a “fixed-wing” mode, and “scout areas after a hurricane, with a lot of different really high-end camera options,” said John Simmons, a representative for Autel Robotics at the CES 2022 exhibit.
The drone charging platform is called EVO Nest, while the long-range, fixed-wing VTOL is called the “Dragonfish” series. And it could simplify the energy needs of visual surveillance, monitoring, and public service.
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The Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department are already using the technology.
Who can forget the attack on Capital last January 6th? For those who do remember it well, there is an urgency to do something to avoid it ever happening again. One way to do that is to predict these events before they happen just like you can predict weather patterns.
Some data scientists believe they can achieve exactly that, according to The Washington Post. “We now have the data — and opportunity — to pursue a very different path than we did before,” said Clayton Besaw, who helps run CoupCast, a machine-learning-driven program based at the University of Central Florida that predicts coups for a variety of countries.
This type of predictive modeling has been around for a while but has mostly focused on countries where political unrest is far more common. Now, the hope is that it can be redirected to other nations to help prevent events like that of January 6th. And so far, the firms working in this field have been quite successful.
