A digital map of rocks, cavities, and utility pipes underground creates a unique signature. Cars can follow it, at speed, in snow, and be within 2 inches of the road center, says WaveSense.
Category: robotics/AI – Page 1835
JAXA, Japan’s national space agency, has just approved a robotic mission to visit the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos and retrieve a small sample from the former to bring back to Earth.
The mission plan: It’s called Martian Moon eXploration, or MMX. JAXA currently plans to launch MMX in 2024 and make it to the Martian system the following year. MMX will spend three years in the system studying and mapping the moons. The mission will make use of 11 different instruments, including a NASA-funded instrument called MEGAE that will measure the elemental composition of both bodies (perhaps revealing signs of ancient water).
The mission will also deploy a small rover to zip around the surface of Phobos, not unlike what JAXA’s Hayabusa2 mission deployed on the surface of the asteroid Ryugu.
Researchers at MIT reported Thursday that they have harnessed artificial intelligence to identify a completely new antibiotic compound that killed all but one of the antibacterial-resistant pathogens they tested it on. Drug-resistant bacteria are a large and growing problem, causing 2.8 million infections and 35,000 deaths in the U.S. each year and more in developing countries, STAT News reports. The computer learning model developed at MIT, described in the journal Cell, has the potential to identify many new types of antibiotics.
The researchers named the compound halicin, after HAL, the initially useful, eventually murderous sentient computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. They also discovered eight more promising antibacterial compounds, two of which appear very powerful. They tried out halicin on mice and plan to work with a nonprofit or drugmaker to see if it’s effective and safe in humans.
The MIT team’s machine-learning model independently looked for certain properties — in this case, the ability to kill E. coli and not harm humans — among about 2,500 molecules in a drug repurposing database. Halicin was originally considered as a treatment for diabetes.
Robots are replacing human manufacturing workers in France, and making companies more productive in the process.
Daron Acemoglu at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues analysed more than 55,000 French manufacturing firms, noting which ones bought robots between 2010 and 2015 and what impacts the purchases had.
A Google AI tool that can recognise and label what’s in an image will no longer attach gender tags like “woman” or “man” to photos of people. Google’s Cloud Vision API is a service for developers that allows them to, among other things, attach labels to photos identifying the contents. The tool can detect faces, landmarks, brand logos, and even explicit content, and has a host of uses from retailers using visual search to researchers identifying animal species.
A deep-learning model identifies a powerful new drug that can kill many species of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
China is deploying robots and drones to remotely disinfect hospitals, deliver food and enforce quarantine restrictions as part of the effort to fight coronavirus.
Chinese state media has reported that drones and robots are being used by the government to cut the risk of person-to-person transmission of the disease.
There are 780 million people that are on some form of residential lockdown in China. Wuhan, the city where the viral outbreak began, has been sealed off from the outside world for weeks.
