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Category: robotics/AI – Page 1,737

It seems these robots could be used to spy on you from home. 😃

A team of researchers demonstrated that popular robotic household vacuum cleaners can be remotely hacked to act as microphones.

The researchers—including Nirupam Roy, an assistant professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Computer Science—collected information from the laser-based in a popular vacuum robot and applied and deep learning techniques to recover speech and identify playing in the same room as the device.

The research demonstrates the potential for any device that uses light detection and ranging (Lidar) technology to be manipulated for collecting , despite not having a microphone. This work, which is a collaboration with assistant professor Jun Han at the University of Singapore was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2020) on November 18, 2020.

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AI startup RealityEngines. AI changed its name to Abacus.AI in July. At the same time, it announced a $13 million Series A round. Today, only a few months later, it is not changing its name again, but it is announcing a $22 million Series B round, led by Coatue, with Decibel Ventures and Index Partners participating as well. With this, the company, which was co-founded by former AWS and Google exec Bindu Reddy, has now raised a total of $40.3 million.

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Newfound Autonomy

There are ways that a robot companion could outperform humans, Jecker says, by providing sympathetic and patient support free of judgment and condescension around the clock.

“It relates to issues of dignity,” Jecker told the Times. “The ability to be sexual at any age relates to your ability to have a life. Not just to survive, but to have a life, and do things that have value. Relationships. Bodily integrity. These things are a matter of dignity.”

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AI designed to be aware of it’s own competence.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador interviews Dr. Jiangying Zhou, DARPA program manager in the Defense Sciences Office, USA.

Ira Pastor comments:

On this episode of ideaXme, we meet once more with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), but unlike the past few shows where we been spent time with thought leaders from the Biologic Technology Office (BTO), today we’re going to be focused on the Defense Sciences Office (DSO) which identifies and pursues high-risk, high-payoff research initiatives across a broad spectrum of science and engineering disciplines and transforms them into important, new game-changing technologies for U.S. national security. Current DSO themes include frontiers in math, computation and design, limits of sensing and sensors, complex social systems, and anticipating surprise.

Dr. Jiangying Zhou became a DARPA program manager in the Defense Sciences Office in November 2018, having served as a program manager in the Strategic Technology Office (STO) since January 2018. Her areas of research include machine learning, artificial intelligence, data analytics, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) exploitation technologies.

Continue reading “Expect the Unexpected: Frontiers of Mathematics, Computation, Systems and Design” | >

Fido, meet F1d0.

Newly developed robotic K9s will soon be prowling Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Florida, to enhance security and surveillance patrolling, WMBB-TV reported Monday.

The 325th Security Forces Squadron, which handles security for the base, said the robo-dogs are weatherproof, four-legged, unmanned patrolling drones that have two-way communication abilities and high-tech sensors that cost about $100,000 a pop, the outlet reported.

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NVIDA has surpassed the 2 terabyte-per-second memory bandwidth mark with its new GPU, the Santa Clara graphics giant announced Monday.

The top-of-the-line A100 80GB GPU is expected to be integrated in multiple GPU configurations in systems during the first half of 2021.

Earlier this year, NVIDIA unveiled the A100 featuring Ampere architecture, asserting that the GPU provided “the largest leap in performance” ever in its lineup of graphics hardware. It said AI training on the GPU could see performance boosts of 20 times the speed of its earlier generation units.

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To perform tasks that involve moving or handling objects, robots should swiftly adapt their grasp and manipulation strategies based on the properties of these objects and the environment surrounding them. Most robotic hands developed so far, however, have a fixed and limiting structure; thus, they can perform a limited number of movements and can only grasp specific types of objects.

Researchers at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have recently developed a robotic that can change its shape and switch across three different configurations, which could allow it to grasp a broader variety of objects. This fingertip’s unique design, outlined in a paper presented at this year’s IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), is inspired by origami, the renowned Japanese art of paper folding.

“Our study was inspired by two common observations in current research and ,” Zicheng Kan and Yazhan Zhang, two of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore via email. “The first relates to parallel grippers developed in past research studies, which could help to achieve industrial automation. These grippers require well-selected grasping points, otherwise static equilibrium might not be achieved.”

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