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Category: robotics/AI – Page 1,744

Three years of underground robotics competitions culminate in a final event in September with $5 million in prize money.

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge Final Event is scheduled to take place at the Louisville Mega Cavern in Louisville, Kentucky, from September 21 to 23. We’ve followed SubT teams as they’ve explored their way through abandoned mines, unfinished nuclear reactors, and a variety of caves, and now everything comes together in one final course where the winner of the Systems Track will take home the $2 million first prize.

It’s a fitting reward for teams that have been solving some of the hardest problems in robotics, but winning isn’t going to be easy, and we’ll talk with SubT Program Manager Tim Chung about what we have to look forward to.

Since we haven’t talked about SubT in a little while (what with the unfortunate covid-related cancellation of the Systems Track Cave Circuit), here’s a quick refresher of where we are: the teams have made it through the Tunnel Circuit, the Urban Circuit, and a virtual version of the Cave Circuit, and some of them have been testing in caves of their own. The Final Event will include all of these environments, and the teams of robots will have 60 minutes to autonomously map the course, locating artifacts to score points. Since I’m not sure where on Earth there’s an underground location that combines tunnels and caves with urban structures, DARPA is going to have to get creative, and the location in which they’ve chosen to do that is Louisville, Kentucky.

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Like something straight out of a pulpy sci-fi horror flick, researchers at Tufts University and the University of Vermont (UVM) have engineered a new generation of living robots they call Xenobots, which demonstrate cooperative swarm activity while collecting piles of micro particles.

Last year, this same team of scientists and biologists created tiny self-healing bio-machines that exhibited movement, payload pushing abilities, and a sort of hive mentality. The blueprints for creating these biological bots, which technically aren’t a typical robot or a catalogued animal species, but instead are more akin to a distinct class of unique artifact that acts as a living, programmable organism.

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Bay Area-based Rapid Robotics today announced a $12 million Series A. The new round, led by NEA, brings the company’s total funding up to $17.5 million. It joins a recently closed seed round, announced way back in November of last year. Existing investors Greycroft, Bee Partners and 468 Capital also took part in the round.

We noted at that stage that COVID-19 had a sizable impact on robotics investment. At the very least, the pandemic has served to accelerate interest in automation, as many “non-essential” workers have been unable to travel to their jobs. At present, manufacturing jobs often lack the ability to perform remotely.

Rapid notes that the company’s tech has been involved with the production of some 50 million parts over the past year, over a wide variety of different manufacturing verticals. And, like his predecessor, President Biden has already begun talking up strategies to return manufacturing jobs to the U.S. Of course, ambitious as it might be, any plan is going to have to be a balancing act between human jobs and automation.

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Summary: Combining artificial intelligence technology with brain scan data, researchers have identified three novel subtypes of multiple sclerosis.

Source: UCL

Scientists at UCL have used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify three new multiple sclerosis (MS) subtypes. Researchers say the groundbreaking findings will help identify those people more likely to have disease progression and help target treatments more effectively.

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Using Artificial Intelligence And Plant Biology, To Re-Connect People and Plants, For Health & Wellness — Dr. Lee Chae, Ph.D., Co-Founder & CTO, Brightseed.

Dr. Lee Chae, Ph.D., is a Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Brightseed, a novel life sciences company, merging the tools of plant biology and artificial intelligence, with a goal of enabling a healthier future by re-illuminating and re-activating the connections between people and plants.

Dr. Chae is a seasoned R&D technology developer and has designed advanced discovery methodologies for food technology, agricultural biotech, bio-medicine, and synthetic biology. He has been a principal scientist of multiple discoveries, including machine-learning driven discovery of novel nutritional bio-actives in plants and computationally guided identification of plant-based proteins for food.

With as Ph.D in Plant Biology, Computational and Genomic Biology, from University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Chae was also a founding member of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute, and did Post-Doctoral Research at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford.

Prior to Brightseed, Dr. Chae served as the VP of R&D at Hampton Creek, a company developing and marketing plant-based alternatives to conventionally-produced food products.

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HELSINKI — Guangzhou is developing a major space cluster in the city by hosting new projects including the new headquarters for the space business of Geely Technology Group.

Geely, a major automaker which owns Volvo Cars and part of Daimler AG, is to establish a space headquarters in Nansha district to oversee development of its satellite and communications technologies, local government said March 30.

Geely is developing a low Earth orbit constellation for navigation, connectivity and communications needed for self-driving cars. The group recently gained approval to begin manufacturing satellites.

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Russia is amassing unprecedented military might in the Arctic and testing its newest weapons in a region freshly ice-free due to the climate emergency, in a bid to secure its northern coast and open up a key shipping route from Asia to Europe.

Weapons experts and Western officials have expressed particular concern about one Russian ‘super-weapon,’ the Poseidon 2M39 torpedo. Development of the torpedo is moving fast with Russian President Vladimir Putin requesting an update on a “key stage” of the tests in February from his defence minister Sergei Shoigu, with further tests planned this year, according to multiple reports in state media.

This unmanned stealth torpedo is powered by a nuclear reactor and intended by Russian designers to sneak past coastal defences — like those of the US — on the sea floor.

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