Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have recently explored the unique properties of nonlinear waves to facilitate a wide range of applications including impact mitigation, asymmetric transmission, switching and focusing. In a new study now published on Science Advances, Bolei Deng and a team of research scientists at Harvard, CNRS and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in the U.S. and France harnessed the propagation of nonlinear waves to make flexible structures crawl. They combined bioinspired experimental and theoretical methods to show how such pulse-driven locomotion could reach a maximum efficiency when the initiated pulses were solitons (solitary wave). The simple machine developed in the work could move across a wide range of surfaces and steer onward. The study expanded the variety of possible applications with nonlinear waves to offer a new platform for flexible machines.

Flexible structures that are capable of large deformation are attracting interest in bioengineering due to their intriguing static response and their ability to support elastic waves of large amplitude. By carefully controlling their geometry, the elastic energy landscape of highly deformable systems can be engineered to propagate a variety of nonlinear waves including vector solitons, transition waves and rarefaction pulses. The dynamic behavior of such structures demonstrate a very rich physics, while offering new opportunities to manipulate the propagation of mechanical signals. Such mechanisms can allow unidirectional propagation, wave guiding, mechanical logic and mitigation, among other applications.

In this work, Deng et al. were inspired by the biological retrograde peristaltic wave motion in earthworms and the ability of linear elastic waves to generate motion in ultrasonic motors. The team showed the propagation of nonlinear elastic waves in flexible structures to provide opportunities for locomotion. As proof of concept, they focused on a Slinky – and used it to create a pulse-driven robot capable of propelling itself. They built the simple machine by connecting the Slinky to a pneumatic actuator. The team used an electromagnet and a plate embedded between the loops to initiate nonlinear pulses to propagate along the device from the front to the back, allowing the pulse directionality to dictate the simple robot to move forward. The results indicated the efficiency of such pulse-driven locomotion to be optimal with solitons – large amplitude nonlinear pulses with a constant velocity and stable shape along propagation.

Quantum machine learning, an emerging field that combines machine learning and quantum physics, is the focus of research to discover possible treatments for COVID-19, according to Penn State researchers led by Swaroop Ghosh, the Joseph R. and Janice M. Monkowski Career Development Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering. The researchers believe that this method could be faster and more economical than the current methods used for drug discovery.

Seed funding from the Penn State Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, as part of their rapid-response seed funding for research across the University to address COVID-19, is supporting this work.

“Discovering any new drug that can cure a disease is like finding a needle in a haystack,” Ghosh said.

In a preprint paper, DeepMind researchers propose a paradigm for comparing the exploration behaviors of children and AI models.

What is supervised learning (+ regression, classification,…) :

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Circa 2019

The insect reveals a vision strategy that takes the computing challenges out of stereo vision.

Continue reading “A praying mantis wearing tiny glasses holds the key to robot vision” »

Sometime around 6:30PM ET on May 6th, popular iOS apps from major companies like DoorDash, Spotify, TikTok, and Venmo suddenly starting crashing. The culprit didn’t remain a mystery for long.

Developers on Twitter and GitHub quickly discovered the cause to be an issue with the software development kit (SDK) from Facebook, which is interwoven into the operation of countless mobile apps from companies large and small. The problem, while resolved rather quickly by Facebook, illustrates the scope of the social network’s platform and how even minor issues can have major ripple effects throughout the mobile software industry.

“Earlier today, a new release of Facebook included a change that triggered crashes for some users in some apps using the Facebook iOS SDK,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Verge yesterday in a statement. “We identified the issue quickly and resolved it. We apologize for any inconvenience.” The Facebook SDK is a bundle of software tools for developers that helps power features like signing in with a Facebook account and providing share to Facebook buttons. So the issue was not unique to iOS; it could have happened to the Android SDK and, in this case, simply affected Apple’s platform.

Circa 2020

The present age of information technology – the transformation of daily life by laptop computers, smartphones, so-called artificial intelligence, etc – became possible thanks to the exponential increase in the processing power of microcircuits, which began in the 1970s and continues today.

This process is described empirically by the famous Moore’s law: the number of transistor elements that can be packed into an integrated circuit chip doubles about every two years.

Continue reading “Fusion power enters world of ‘extreme light’” »

DARPA’s NOMARS project could be a giant leap forward for the US Navy’s unmanned aspirations.

Leidos subsidiary Dynetics has won a $12.3m valued phase 1 of the Air Combat Evolution (ACE) programme, Technical Area 3 (TA3).

The ACE TA3 (Alpha Mosaic) contract was awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Strategic Technology Office (STO).

As an initial challenge scenario, the programme uses aerial dogfighting for implementing artificial intelligence (AI) into high-intensity air conflicts, which increases the soldier’s trust in combat autonomy.