Understanding electrons’ intricate behavior has led to discoveries that transformed society, such as the revolution in computing made possible by the invention of the transistor.
Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,284
California police put Robocop on patrol in park
A Southern California police force is welcoming a robot to the department. Huntington Park police say “HP RoboCop” will provide 360-degree high-definition video footage. (June 18)
Subscribe for more Breaking News: http://smarturl.it/AssociatedPress
Website: https://apnews.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AP
Facebook: https://facebook.com/APNews
Google+: https://plus.google.com/115892241801867723374
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/APNews/
You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/a1e7febf5c776eb70daeed9dfe7bea48
First-ever successful mind-controlled robotic arm without brain implants
A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with the University of Minnesota, has made a breakthrough in the field of noninvasive robotic device control. Using a noninvasive brain-computer interface (BCI), researchers have developed the first-ever successful mind-controlled robotic arm exhibiting the ability to continuously track and follow a computer cursor.
Being able to noninvasively control robotic devices using only thoughts will have broad applications, in particular benefiting the lives of paralyzed patients and those with movement disorders.
BCIs have been shown to achieve good performance for controlling robotic devices using only the signals sensed from brain implants. When robotic devices can be controlled with high precision, they can be used to complete a variety of daily tasks. Until now, however, BCIs successful in controlling robotic arms have used invasive brain implants. These implants require a substantial amount of medical and surgical expertise to correctly install and operate, not to mention cost and potential risks to subjects, and as such, their use has been limited to just a few clinical cases.
The world’s best supercomputers are being updated to run AI software faster
The upgrades include changes to make AI programming simpler—and to speed up powerful machines for specific AI tasks.
The news: The International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) kicked off in Frankfurt yesterday with the release of the latest list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world. US machines still top the ranking, but China has the most computers on the list (219 versus 116 for the US).
Supercomputers have already turbocharged some AI applications. For example. the US’s Summit supercomputer (pictured above), which leads the Top 500, has already run a complex machine-learning model for climate research faster than any other machine.
Applying active inference body perception to a humanoid robot
A key challenge for robotics researchers is developing systems that can interact with humans and their surrounding environment in situations that involve varying degrees of uncertainty. In fact, while humans can continuously learn from their experiences and perceive their body as a whole as they interact with the world, robots do not yet have these capabilities.
Researchers at the Technical University of Munich have recently carried out an ambitious study in which they tried to apply “active inference,” a theoretical construct that describes the ability to unite perception and action, to a humanoid robot. Their study is part of a broader EU-funded project called SELFCEPTION, which bridges robotics and cognitive psychology with the aim of developing more perceptive robots.
“The original research question that triggered this work was to provide humanoid robots and artificial agents in general with the capacity to perceive their body as humans do,” Pablo Lanillos, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “The main goal was to improve their capabilities to interact under uncertainty. Under the umbrella of the Selfception.eu Marie Skłodowska-Curie project we initially defined a roadmap to include some characteristics of human perception and action into robots.”
Scientists discover new type of self-healing material
A research group from RIKEN and Kyushu University has developed a new type of material, based on ethylene, which exhibits a number of useful properties such as self-healing and shape memory. Remarkably, some of the materials can spontaneously self-heal even in water or acidic and alkali solutions. The new material is based on ethylene, a compound that is the source of much of the plastic in use today.
Materials that can self-heal have become a popular area of research during the last decade, and a variety of materials have been developed. However, most of the self-healing materials reported to date have relied on sophisticated designs that incorporate chemical mechanisms into polymer networks, such as irreversible or reversible covalent-bond formation, hydrogen bonding, metal-ligand interactions, or ionic interactions. As a result, they require some external stimulus, such as heat or pressure, to prompt them to heal, and in most cases, they do not function in water, acid or alkaline solutions because the chemical networks cannot survive such conditions. The ideal is to create a material that possesses sufficient toughness and can autonomously self-heal under various conditions.
For the present research, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the researchers used a catalyst based on scandium, a rare metal, to create polymers composed of alternating sequences of ethylene and anisylpropylenes and shorter ethylene-ethylene segments by the copolymerization of ethylene and anisylpropylenes. This new class of well-defined, functionalized polyolefins ranged from soft viscoelastic materials—materials that can be both elastic but also exhibit liquid-like properties—to tough elastomers, which can be stretched but return to their original shapes, and rigid plastics. The elastomer copolymers were very elastic, and tough, and also showed remarkable self-healing property, as they autonomously self-healed when subjected to mechanical damage not only in a dry environment but also in water and aqueous acid and alkaline solutions, without the need for any external energy or stimulus.