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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,316

Pulse eVTOL concept drops its cabin onto an autonomous car chassis

Here’s one we missed from several months ago: Brazilian eVTOL innovator EmbraerX put forth a fun video showing how a multi-mode 3D transport system might work, with an eVTOL air taxi carrying a detachable glassed-over cabin that it delivers straight onto a self-driving car chassis.

The coming new breed of eVTOL air taxis are nearly all, at this stage, designed to work as part of a multi-mode transport scheme. The flying taxis themselves will travel from skyport to skyport, meaning you’ll need other means to get yourself to the takeoff point and something else again at the other end for the last mile. It’s simply not practical to expect eVTOLs to drop you off right at your destination.

Companies like Uber are salivating at the thought of being able to offer the whole service as a single sale, co-ordinating a car at each end to minimize travel time, but that starts looking like a bit of an annoyance when you consider the hope is that people will use these things for the daily commute. Four taxis and two eVTOLs every day is a pain.

Wearable Robotic Exoskeletons For Everybody!

Roam Robotics is making robotic exoskeletons that are lightweight and affordable so that they can become a new category of consumer electronics. Traditional robotic exoskeletons can weigh between 30 to 60 pounds because they rely on high precision mechanical systems. They are big and bulky and cost as much as a luxury car, which significantly limits their usefulness and availability. Roam’s new robotic exoskeletons are so portable and inexpensive that they could quickly become a commonplace part of modern life.

An artificial intelligence system reveals liquiritin inhibits SARS-CoV-2

The pandemic COVID-19 has spread to all over the world and greatly threatens safety and health of people. COVID-19 is highly infectious and with high mortality rate. As no effective antiviral treatment is currently available, new drugs are urgently needed. We employed transcriptional analysis to uncover potential antiviral drugs from natural products or FDA approved drugs. We found liquiritin significantly inhibit replication of SARS-CoV-2 in Vero E6 cells with EC50 = 2.39 μM. Mechanistically, we found liquiritin exerts anti-viral function by mimicking type I interferon. Upregulated genes induced by liquiritin are enriched in GO categories including type I interferon signaling pathway, negative regulation of viral genome replication and etc. In toxicity experiment, no death was observed when treated at dose of 300 mg/kg for a week in ICR mice. All the organ indexes but liver and serum biochemical indexes were normal after treatment. Liquiritin is abundant in licorice tablet (~0.2% by mass), a traditional Chinese medicine. Together, we recommend liquiritin as a competitive candidate for treating COVID-19. We also expect liquiritin to have a broad and potent antiviral function to other viral pathogens, like HBV, HIV and etc.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Volvo Will Add Lidar for ‘Eyes-Off-the-Road’ Self-Driving Cars on Highways

It’s 2020. Why can’t we binge Netflix as our cars drive us down the highway? Well, we’ve made progress, but not at the pace once promised. While some cars offer automated driving modes, you’re not to take your eyes off the road or hands from the wheel. Volvo wants to remedy that.

The company isn’t promising 100% self-driving cars in the near future. Instead, they’ll make mainstream cars that reliably drive themselves on highways—totally autonomously, no human attention needed. For a brand built on safety, and in light of autopilot accidents in recent years, it’s notable the company thinks that’s possible in the not-too-distant future.

To make it happen, Volvo said this week that it would begin adding lidar to production cars in 2022. They’ll also develop self-driving software to integrate lidar, cameras, radar, and back-up vehicle control systems. Once the software, dubbed Highway Pilot, is deemed safe, it’ll be sent out as an update to customers who opt in.

Chips are down for artificial intelligence

This raises the question of whether AI — defined as algorithms that mimic human intelligence — can deliver on its potential, and when. The answer is crucial because AI could become the ultimate industry disrupter, threatening tens of millions of jobs in Asia as business processes are automated. In addition, AI is the subject of intense rivalry between the US and China.

Unicorns abound but enthusiasm has dimmed. Will AI fulfil its potential?

Technology In A Time Of Crisis: How DARPA And AI Are Shaping The Future

Then there is the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), a multi-institutional initiative that includes The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Allen Institute for AI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), Microsoft, and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The goal of this initiative is to create new natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to scour scientific and medical literature to help researchers prioritize potential therapies to evaluate for further study. AI is also being used to automate screening at checkpoints by evaluating temperature via thermal cameras, as well as modulations in sweat and skin discoloration. What’s more, AI-powered robots have even been used to monitor and treat patients. In Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic, an entire field hospital was transitioned into a “smart hospital” fully staffed by AI robotics.

Any time of great challenge is a time of great change. The waves of technological innovation that are occurring now will echo throughout eternity. Science, technology, engineering and mathematics are experiencing a call to mobilization that will forever alter the fabric of discovery in the fields of bioengineering, biomimicry and artificial intelligence. The promise of tomorrow will be perpetuated by the pangs of today. It is the symbiosis of all these fields that will power future innovations.

Researchers tap CRISPR technology to connect biology, electronics

In an effort to create first-of-kind microelectronic devices that connect with biological systems, University of Maryland (UMD) researchers are utilizing CRISPR technology in a novel way to electronically turn “on” and “off” several genes simultaneously. Their technique, published in Nature Communications, has the potential to further bridge the gap between the electronic and biological worlds, paving the way for new wearable and “smart” devices.

“Faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, we now have an even deeper understanding of how ‘smart’ devices could benefit the general population,” said William E. Bentley, professor in UMD’s Fischell Department of Bioengineering and Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research (IBBR), and director of the Robert E. Fischell Institute for Biomedical Devices. “Imagine what the world would be like if we could wear a device and access an app on our smartphone capable of detecting whether the wearer has the active virus, generated immunity, or has not been infected. We don’t have this yet, but it is increasingly clear that a suite of technologies enabling rapid transfer of information between biology and electronics is needed to make this a reality.”

With such a , this information could be used, for example, to dynamically and autonomously conduct effective contact tracing, Bentley said.

The AI Show: How Intel built a chip with a sense of smell

Intel’s fifth-generation Loihi chip uses neuromorphic computing to learn faster on less training data than traditional artificial intelligence techniques — including how to smell like a human does and make accurate conclusions based on a tiny dataset of essentially just one sample.

“That’s really one of the main things we’re trying to understand and map into silicon … the brain’s ability to learn with single examples,” Mike Davies, the director of Intel’s Neuromorphic Computing Lab, told me recently on The AI Show podcast. “So with just showing one clean presentation of an odor, we can store that in this high dimensional representation in the chip, and then it allows it to then recognize a variety of noisy, corrupted, occluded odors like you would be faced with in the real world.”

Deep-Learning Techniques Classify Cuttings Volume of Shale Shakers

A real-time deep-learning model is proposed to classify the volume of cuttings from a shale shaker on an offshore drilling rig by analyzing the real-time monitoring video stream. As opposed to the traditional, time-consuming video-analytics method, the proposed model can implement a real-time classification and achieve remarkable accuracy. The approach is composed of three modules. Compared with results manually labeled by engineers, the model can achieve highly accurate results in real time without dropping frames.

Introduction

A complete work flow already exists to guide the maintenance and cleaning of the borehole for many oil and gas companies. A well-formulated work flow helps support well integrity and reduce drilling risks and costs. One traditional method needs human observation of cuttings at the shale shaker and a hydraulic and torque-and-drag model; the operation includes a number of cleanup cycles. This continuous manual monitoring of the cuttings volume at the shale shaker becomes the bottleneck of the traditional work flow and is unable to provide a consistent evaluation of the hole-cleaning condition because the human labor cannot be available consistently, and the torque-and-drag operation is discrete, containing a break between two cycles.

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