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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2291

As the saying goes, “If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself,” and it seems that you’ll soon be able to get a lot more done using artificially intelligent, high-tech exoskeleton Kindred. It’s the product of a startup created by quantum computing company D-Wave’s founder Geordie Rose, and according to the venture capital firm funding Kindred, the device “uses AI-driven robotics so that one human worker can do the work of four.”

Based on a patent application, the wearable system is envisioned as a 1.2-meter tall humanoid that may be covered with synthetic skin. It will include a head-mounted display and an exo-suit of sensors and actuators that carries out everyday tasks.

Essentially, it looks something like Spider-Man’s Doctor Octopus on the outside, but on the inside, Kindred utilizes quantum computation, a way of information processing and storage that is much faster and more powerful than that used by conventional computers. Data “learned” by the suit can be taught to other robots, allowing those robots to then perform the tasks autonomously.

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Phototactic behaviour directs some bacteria towards light and others into darkness: This enables them to utilize solar energy as efficiently as possible for their metabolism, or, otherwise, protects them from excessive light intensity. A team of researchers headed by Clemens Bechinger from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the University of Stuttgart, as well as colleagues from the University of Düsseldorf have now found a surprisingly simple way to direct synthetic microswimmers towards light or darkness. Their findings could eventually lead to minuscule robots that seek out and treat lesions in the human body.

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A new system called HeroSurg, developed by researchers at Deakin and Harvard Universities, is set to increase what surgeons can achieve via robotic surgery, using a haptic feedback system to provide a sense of touch. It also brings other improvements over existing tech, such as collision avoidance, to make robotic surgery safer and more accurate.

Robotic surgery, wherein human-controlled robots perform delicate surgical tasks, has been around for a while. One great example of the tech is the da Vinci robotic surgical system from Intuitive Surgical – a setup made up of numerous robotic arms, a console to operate the instruments, and an imaging system that shows the surgeon what’s happening in real time. In 2008, Professor Suren Krishnan, a member of the team behind HeroSurg, became the first surgeon to perform ear, throat and nose operations using the da Vinci robotic surgical system.

Since then, we’ve seen numerous breakthroughs, including improvements to the original da Vinci system, and other robots emerging capable of achieving impressive tasks, such as performing surgery on a beating heart, or successfully stitching soft tissue.

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The exploration of Europa begins under the ice in Antarctica.

That’s where a team of researchers, led by the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), has been testing a variety of robotic subs in recent years to learn about what technologies will work best when NASA eventually launches a mission to Jupiter’s icy moon.

“I really want us to go down through the ice on Europa. I want to explore what’s down there,” says Britney Schmidt, assistant professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech and principal investigator for the NASA-funded project called SIMPLE, for Sub-ice Investigation of Marine and Planetary-analog Ecosystems.

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IBM delivered on the DARPA SyNAPSE project with a one million neuron brain-inspired processor. The chip consumes merely 70 milliwatts, and is capable of 46 billion synaptic operations per second, per watt–literally a synaptic supercomputer in your palm.

Along the way—progressing through Phase 0, Phase 1, Phase 2, and Phase 3—we have journeyed from neuroscience to supercomputing, to a new computer architecture, to a new programming language, to algorithms, applications, and now to a new chip—TrueNorth.

Fabricated in Samsung’s 28nm process, with 5.4 billion transistors, TrueNorth is IBM’s largest chip to date in transistor count. While simulating complex recurrent neural networks, TrueNorth consumes less than 100mW of power and has a power density of 20mW / cm2.

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The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity has launched a multi-year research and development effort to create new technologies that could provide an early warning system for detecting precursors to cyberattacks. If successful, the government effort could help businesses and other targets move beyond the reactive approach to contending with a massive and growing problem.

IARPA, part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, says the three-and-a-half year program will develop software code to sense unconventional indicators of cyber attack, and use the data to develop models and machine learning systems that can create probabilistic warnings.

Current early warning systems are focused on traditional cyber indicators such as activity targeted toward IP addresses and domain names, according to IARPA program manager Robert Rahmer. The first stage, lasting 18 months, will examine data outside of the victim network, such as black market sales of exploits that take advantage of particular software bugs. The second and third phases, 12 months each, will examine internal target organization data and look for ways to develop warnings and transfer any tools that emerge from the research from one organization to another, he said.

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Cool new story in the San Francisco Chronicle about the robotics conference. I gave a speech at it yesterday.

At the two-day RoboBusiness Conference, about 2,000 people were serenaded with lullabies and Disney tunes, including “Let It Go” from the hit film “Frozen,” by a human-like robot designed to comfort senior citizens and autistic children.

And next to a man-size robot that can drive a motorcycle 190 mph around a race track, a half-dozen ant-size robots quickly scurried about a miniature factory floor.

“In five years, could you imagine what this conference is going to look like?” Transhumanist Party presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan asked the crowd. “There are going to be 8-foot robots walking all around us, talking to us, some of them maybe being smarter than us.”

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