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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2347
No offense Tesla, Google, GM, etc.
China has banned highway testing of autonomous vehicles while the country’s auto-industry regulator works with local police to determine specific national rules about autonomous car testing.
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Nice.
Who’s calling the shots now? After nearly four years on the job, NASA’s Curiosity rover is finally making certain scientific decisions on its own. The Martian explorer now picks some of the rock targets to blast with the laser on its ChemCam instrument.
A software upgrade known as AEGIS allows the rover to make key decisions when Mars is out of sync with Curiosity’s handlers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, delivering more data in less time. It’s the first time a robot has been able to choose such science targets autonomously on any planetary mission.
“Time on Mars is valuable and we get more data this way and we get the data much faster,” said AEGIS team member Raymond Francis, a scientific applications software engineer at JPL.
MIT researchers have created an algorithm that hopes to understand human visual social cues and predict what would happen next. Giving AI the ability to understand and predict human social interaction could one day pave the way to efficient home assistant systems as well as intelligent security cameras that can call an ambulance or the police ahead of time.
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory created an algorithm that utilizes deep learning, which enables artificial intelligence (AI) to use patterns of human interaction to predict what will happen next. Researchers fed the program with videos featuring human social interactions and tested it to see if it “learned” well enough to be able to predict them.
The researchers’ weapons of choice? 600 hours of Youtube videos and sitcoms, including The Office, Desperate Housewives, and Scrubs. While this lineup may seem questionable, MIT doctoral candidate and project researcher Carl Vondrick reasons out that accessibility and realism were part of the criteria.
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Robot animated GIF
Posted in robotics/AI
The Zapata technology platform is the safest, easiest, lightest, most maneuverable, and least expensive personal aviation system ever created.
Capable of being operated with only 20 hours of flight training, or in fully autonomous mode with GPS guidance, ZAPATA’s proprietary balance methodology and algorithms are truly disruptive.
ZAPATA’s technology and innovative products will unlock hundreds of applications across multiple industry sectors, from military and rescue to entertainment and recreation.
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The idea of a space elevator to lift us into orbit is one of the oldest concepts in sci-fi, but thanks to the efforts of scientists in Japan, we might soon be seeing this fantastic feat of engineering become a reality at last.
A mini satellite called STARS-C (Space Tethered Autonomous Robotic Satellite-Cube) is heading to the International Space Station in the coming months and is a prototype design that could form the basis of a future space elevator.
Once STARS-C has been delivered – on some to-be-determined date after the Northern Hemisphere’s summer – its makers at Shizuoka University will put it to the test: the orbiter will split into two 10-cm (3.94-inch) cubes and spool out a thin 100-metre tether made of Kevlar between them.
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Overview
This is the third article in a series of posts documenting how a team of six interns used IBM Watson to program robots to play poker.
In the previous article, we introduced the Watson services that are available to developers and how to interact with them with Watson Developer Cloud. In this article, we’ll show how we used the Speech-to-Text service to extract speech from audio.
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