Lifeboat Foundation

Robotic glove doubles or triples the gripping force applied, reducing hand strain. Up next: full exoskeletons for more powerful workers.

Slate summary of the debate on AI Safety:

Fears about A.I. take a very different form depending on whom you ask.

Some researchers think that the benefits of developing an A.G.I. far outweighv the risks, and the question of control is a moot point. Intelligent systems will be developed by humans and controlled by humans, so there is nothing to worry about.

Continue reading “The Threats That Artificial Intelligence Researchers Actually Worry About” »

Although this article is 1 month old; still is too interesting not to share.

SEATTLE — If you happen to see a driverless lawnmower on the side of the road, WSDOT would rather you keep your eyes on the road.

Crews now use a driverless slope mower to clear hard to reach areas that are too dangerous for an operator to sit on a riding mower. It’s proving to be an efficient, safe tool for WSDOT.

Continue reading “Robot mower distracting Seattle drivers” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=QjJ_GffiNEE

Pillo is a smart pill dispenser that stores an entire family’s medication while automatically reordering when supplies run low.

Enhance Readability

Enhancing astronomers’ ability to peer ever more deeply into the cosmos may hinge on developing larger space-based telescopes. A new concept in space telescope design makes use of a modular structure and an assembly robot to build an extremely large telescope in space, performing tasks in which astronaut fatigue would be a problem.

The robotically assembled modular space telescope (RAMST) design is described by Nicolas Lee and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in an article published this week by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems (JATIS).

Ground-based telescopes are limited by atmospheric effects and by their fixed location on the Earth.

Continue reading “New concept would have an assembly robot build an extremely large telescope in space” »

Power sensors for distribution networks have inspired a $77-million DARPA program to build a suite of automated cyberdefenses for power grids.

Who knew; maybe the answer was in the shoes.

A slick walking gait makes the DURUS humanoid robot even more efficient.

Continue reading “DURUS Brings Human-Like Gait (and Fancy Shoes) to Hyper-Efficient Robots” »

PARC is a Xerox company that has received funds from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) through its Inbound, Controlled, Air-Releasable, Unrecoverable Systems (ICARUS) program.

The ICARUS program aims at creating a prototype air vehicle that has the potential to deliver small payloads in an autonomous manner to targeted locations and then disappears after the task it completed. PARC in cooperation with AeroVironment Inc. plans to produce particular materials and the air delivery system that can be made to disappear through a project within ICARUS that is referred to as On-Target Delivery and Disintegration Upon Stress-release Trigger (ONLY-DUST).

The project focuses on producing complex structures that are majorly firm during flight and storage, and at the same time permits reliable on-demand transience. It is possible to potentially scale up the DoD applications of the demonstration system because of its association with AeroVironment Inc., a leading company in unmanned, small aerial vehicles.

There are three buckets.

There are three buckets of jobs right now, and each one will be affected by artificial intelligence. So says Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social and a director with Starbucks, during a conversation on Tuesday at Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Colorado.

The first bucket, Shih says, are the jobs that almost certainly will disappear as AI and machine learning technologies continue to evolve and become more prevalent. This includes things like drivers (thanks to autonomous vehicles), lower-skilled manufacturing jobs (humans out, robots in), and certain research functions (paralegals, etc.).