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Category: robotics/AI – Page 1,945

UPS is working with German startup Wingcopter to develop a new type of delivery drone, to be used for the logistics company’s growing commercial drone delivery efforts both in the U.S. and globally. Wingcopter has already designed an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft that has a range of up to 75 miles and can achieve speeds as high as 150 miles per hour in conditions that include wind speeds of up to 45 miles per hour.

Wingcopter will be working closely with UPS’ Flight Forward subsidiary, the dedicated drone delivery unit that UPS developed last year in July to house its commercial drone delivery program. In October, Flight Forward received Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approval to effectively operate a full-scale “drone airline” at scale for the purpose of package delivery.

Wingcopter has already demonstrated how its drones could operate in commercial settings, including during a demonstration with Merck earlier this year that saw its autonomous eVTOLs carry small packages between the drug company’s various office locations in Darmstadt in Germany. It also used its aircraft to deliver critical medical supplies and life-saving equipment to hard to reach areas, including through partnerships with UNICEF and other relief organizations.

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“We should plan ahead,” warned physicist Stephen Hawking who died last March, 2018, and was buried next to Isaac Newton. “If a superior alien civilization sent us a text message saying, ‘We’ll arrive in a few decades,’ would we just reply, ‘OK, call us when you get here, we’ll leave the lights on’? Probably not, but this is more or less what has happened with AI.”

The memorial stone placed on top of Hawking’s grave included his most famous equation describing the entropy of a black hole. “Here Lies What Was Mortal Of Stephen Hawking,” read the words on the stone, which included an image of a black hole.

“I regard the brain as a computer,” observed Hawking, “which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

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Using new gene-editing technology, researchers have rewired mouse stem cells to fight inflammation caused by arthritis and other chronic conditions. Such stem cells, known as SMART cells (Stem cells Modified for Autonomous Regenerative Therapy), develop into cartilage cells that produce a biologic anti-inflammatory drug that, ideally, will replace arthritic cartilage and simultaneously protect joints and other tissues from damage that occurs with chronic inflammation.

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Perception-Action loops are at the core of most our daily life activities. Subconsciously, our brains use sensory inputs to trigger specific motor actions in real time and this becomes a continuous activity that in all sorts of activities from playing sports to watching TV. In the context of artificial intelligence(AI), perception-action loops are the cornerstone of autonomous systems such as self-driving vehicles. While disciplines such as imitation learning or reinforcement learning have certainly made progress in this area, the current generation of autonomous systems are still nowhere near human skill in making those decisions directly from visual data. Recently, AI researchers from Microsoft published a paper proposing a transfer learning method to learn perception-action policies from in a simulated environment and apply the knowledge to fly an autonomous drone.

The challenge of learning which actions to take based on sensory input is not so much related to theory as to practical implementations. In recent years, methods like reinforcement learning and imitation learning have shown tremendous promise in this area but they remain constrained by the need of large amounts of difficult-to-collect labeled real world data. Simulated data, on the other hand, is easy to generate, but generally does not render safe behaviors in diverse real-life scenarios. Being able to learn policies in simulated environments and extrapolate the knowledge to real world environments remains one of the main challenges of autonomous systems. To advance research in this area, the AI community has created many benchmarks for real world autonomous systems. One of the most challenging is known as first person view drone racing.

In first-person view(FPV) done racing, expert pilots are able to plan and control a quadrotor with high agility using a potentially noisy monocular camera feed, without comprising safety. The Microsoft Research team attempted to build an autonomous agent that can control a drone in FPV racing.

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MIT’s Open Source ventilator design submitted for fast-track FDA approval. #COVID19

In many parts of the world the COVID-19 pandemic is causing shortages in hospital space, staff, medical supplies, and equipment. Severe cases may require breathing support, but there are only so many ventilators available. With that in mind, MIT is working on FDA approval of an emergency ventilator system (E-Vent). They have submitted the design to the FDA for fast track review. The project is open source, so once they have approval the team will release all the data needed to replicate it.

The design is actually made simple by using something that is very common: a manual resuscitator. You have doubtlessly seen these on your favorite medical show. It is the bag someone squeezes while the main character struggles valiantly to save their patient. Of course, having someone sit and squeeze the bag for days on end for thousands of people isn’t very practical and that’s where they’ve included an Arduino-controlled motor to automate the process.

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This movement towards a more automated society has some positives: it will help us stay healthy during times like the present, it will drive down the cost of goods and services, and it will grow our GDP in the long run. But by leaning into automation, will we be enabling a future that keeps us more physically, psychologically, and emotionally distant from each other?

We’re in a crisis, and desperate times call for desperate measures. We’re sheltering in place, practicing social distancing, and trying not to touch each other. And for most of us, this is really unpleasant and difficult. We can’t wait for it to be over.

For better or worse, this pandemic will likely make us pick up the pace on our path to automation, across many sectors and processes. The solutions people implement during this crisis won’t disappear when things go back to normal (and, depending who you talk to, they may never really do so).

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Now a new manufacturing method dubbed “robotic blacksmithing” has the potential to revolutionize the way high-quality structural parts are made, resulting in a new class of customized and optimized products. I am part of a loose coalition of engineers developing this process, a technique I believe can help revive U.S. manufacturing.

Today’s Technologies

Metal parts are used in all kinds of high-performance and safety-critical applications in transportation, mining, construction and power-generation equipment such as turbine engines. Most are made using one of a small number of classical manufacturing processes that haven’t changed much in decades.

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Well this is good news. Now they just need to pour every dime into the manufacturing and hurry the hell up.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the first coronavirus diagnostic test that can be conducted entirely at the point of care.

The test from California-based Cepheid will deliver results in about 45 minutes — much faster than current tests that require a sample to be sent to a centralized lab, where results can take days.

The test has been designed to operate on any of Cepheid’s more than 23,000 automated GeneXpert Systems worldwide, of which 5,000 are in the U.S., the company said. The systems are already being used to test for conditions such as HIV and tuberculosis.

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