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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2173

Waymo, the Alphabet self-driving car company, now has cars driving on public roads in the Phoenix metropolitan area with no one in the driver’s seat. Waymo CEO John Krafcik plans to announce the news today in a speech at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal.

For the last year, Waymo has offered free taxi rides to ordinary people who live near the Phoenix suburb of Chandler. Until recently, the company’s modified Chrysler Pacifica minivans had a Waymo employee in the driver’s seat ready to take control if the car malfunctioned.

Waymo is now confident enough in its technology to dispense with a safety driver. The company has released a video showing Waymo cars driving around the Phoenix area with no one in the driver’s seat:

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In a step towards creating a new class of electronics that look and feel like soft, natural organisms, mechanical engineers at Carnegie Mellon University are developing a fluidic transistor out of a metal alloy of indium and gallium that is liquid at room temperature. From biocompatible disease monitors to shape-shifting robots, the potential applications for such squishy computers are intriguing.

Until recently, the only example of liquid electronics were microswitches made up of tiny glass tubes with a bead of mercury inside that closes the switch when it rolls between two wires. Essentially, the fluidic transistor is a much more sophisticated switch that’s made of a liquid metal alloy that is non-toxic, so it can be infused into rubber to create soft, stretchable circuits.

Unlike the mercury switch, where tilting the vial closes the circuit, the fluidic transistor works by opening and closing the connection between metal droplets using the direction of the voltage. When it flows in one direction, the droplets combine and the circuit closes. If it flows the other way, the droplet splits and the circuit opens.

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“The humanoid robot market will grow from $320.3 million this year to $3.9 billion in 2023,”

The consumer market is definitely there, but you have to deliver a robot that can do practical things. For people working on robots out there. Right Now, I would just sit and focus on a robot that can move around an average kitchen, and make the most basic of meals; show that it can be done, and be sold for a reasonable price, that would be Phase 1. Phase 2 would be rigging up the cooking robot to be able to at least clean an kitchen and a bathroom, eventually an entire house. Phase 3 would be rigging up the cooking/cleaning robot to be able to do basic landscaping tasks. At that point i believe every household in America would want one. Phase 4 would be rigging it with niche entertainment features, and rigging it with the human level AI that turns up around 2029.

Greater interest from manufacturing, medicine, and retail will drive robotics growth for the next five years.

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Editor’s Note: The Falling Walls Conference is an annual, global gathering of forward thinking individuals from 80 countries organized by the Falling Walls Foundation. Each year, on November 9—the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall—20 of the world’s leading scientists are invited to Berlin to present their current breakthrough research. The aim of the conference is to address two questions: Which will be the next walls to fall? And how will that change our lives? The author of the following essay is speaking at this year’s Falling Walls gathering.

This is more than just another industrial revolution—it is something that transcends humankind and even biology.

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