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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2258

One of the oddest military drones aborning reinvents a stillborn technology from 1951. That’s because the unmanned aircraft revolution is resurrecting configurations that were tried more than a half century ago but proved impractical with a human pilot inside. The case in point: Northrop Grumman’s new Tern, a drone designed to do everything armed MQ-1 Predators or MQ-9 Reapers can, but to do it flying from small ships or rugged scraps of land – i.e., no runway needed.

“No one has flown a large, unmanned tailsitter before,” Brad Tousley, director of the Tactical Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Tern’s primary funder, said in a news release. The key word there is “unmanned.”

Back in 1951, when all sorts of vertical takeoff and landing aircraft ideas were being tried, Convair and Lockheed built experimental manned tailsitters for the Navy. Convair’s XFY-1 and Lockheed’s XFV-1, nicknamed “Pogo” and “Pogo Stick,” each had two counter-rotating propellers on its nose and was to take off and land pointing straight up. Convair’s Pogo had a delta wing and, at right angles to the wing, large fins. Lockheed’s Pogo Stick had an X-shaped tail whose trailing tips, like Convair’s wing and fins, sported landing gear.

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In 3 years; can you imagine that?!

Not a week goes by without an update regarding headway made by one automobile manufacturer or another testing out their self-driving prototypes. Some have even started testing the vehicles on site, exciting all who want to embrace a future where self driving vehicles are a common site.

That future is not too far off, but imagine a future where airplanes fly without pilots.

In October Geo.tv reported about ALIAS a project funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (commonly known as DARPA); the ALIAS project run by Aurora Flight Sciences tested pilotless flying using a Cessna Caravan in Manassas, VA where instead of a pilot ALIAS a robot with tubes and pipes and claws flew the plane, with instructions being fed to it by a human pilot using a tablet PC.

Continue reading “Pilotless planes may be landing at airports by 2020” | >

When a human passes away, we create a tombstone as a memorial. Friends and family visit a grave to remember the times they had with that person while they were still alive. Memorial bots are another way to celebrate the life of someone who has passed away. A memorial bot is created by taking the messages sent by a deceased person and passing it through a machine learning model in order to make a bot that replicates the deceased person.

Eugenia Kuyda is the CEO of Luka, a company that builds AI products. When her friend Roman Mazurenko suddenly died, she worked with her team to make a bot that replicates his speech patterns. In our interview, we discussed memorial bots, deep learning, and the product Luka is working on–Replika, a personal AI friend for anyone.

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Robots have been a major focus in the technology world for decades and decades, but they and basic science, and for that matter everyday life, have largely been non-overlapping magisteria. That’s changed over the last few years, as robotics and every other field have come to inform and improve each other, and robots have begun to infiltrate and affect our lives in countless ways. So the only surprise in the news that the prestigious journal group Science has established a discrete Robotics imprint is that they didn’t do it earlier.

Editor Guang-Zhong Yang and president of the National Academy of Sciences Marcia McNutt introduce the journal:

In a mere 50 years, robots have gone from being a topic of science fiction to becoming an integral part of modern society. They now are ubiquitous on factory floors, build complex deep-sea installations, explore icy worlds beyond the reach of humans, and assist in precision surgeries… With this growth, the research community that is engaged in robotics has expanded globally. To help meet the need to communicate discoveries across all domains of robotics research, we are proud to announce that Science Robotics is open for submissions.

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Money makes the world go round, or so they say. Payments, investments, insurance and billions of transactions are the beating heart of a fractal economy, which echoes the messy complexity of natural systems, such as the growth of living organisms and the bouncing of atoms.

Financial systems are larger than the sum of their parts. The underlying rules that govern them might seem simple, but what surfaces is dynamic, chaotic and somehow self-organizing. And the blood that flows through this fractal heartbeat is data.

Today, 2.5 exabytes of data are being produced daily. That number is expected to grow to 44 zettabytes a day by 2020 (Source: GigaOm). This data, along with interconnectivity, correlation, predictive analytics and machine learning, provides the foundation for our AI-powered future.

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But Westworld is more than just entertainment. It raises problems that society will have to face head-on as technology gets more powerful. Here are a couple of the biggest.

1. Can we treat robots with respect?

Westworld raises a moral question — at what point do we have to treat machines in a responsible manner? We’re used to dropping our smartphones on the ground without remorse and throwing our broken gadgets in the trash. We may have to think differently as machines show more human traits.

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