Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,374
Japan’s Ridiculously Cute Floating Camera Bot Is Now Operational on The ISS
You know that creepy black sphere used as a floating interrogation droid in Star Wars? It seems like scientists at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) pretty much designed the complete opposite of that, and we want one for our very own.
Called Int-Ball, this adorable little camera drone resembles something Pixar might have come up with, but it’s totally real, and is now a floating companion to astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) – where it helps out by taking photos and recording video, freeing up valuable astronaut time.
Int-Ball was delivered to the ISS in a SpaceX cargo shipment last month – the company’s first involving a reused Dragon cargo capsule – and is now operational, currently undergoing initial testing.
Read more
‘Suicidal’ security robot ‘drowned itself’ at Washington office
July 18 (UPI) — Officials at a Washington, D.C., office building patrolled by a security robot they are investigating after workers reported the robot “drowned itself.”
MRP Realty announced last week there was a “new sheriff in town,” namely a K5 security robot developed by Silicon Valley startup Knightscope, but Bilal Farooqui, a worker at the office complex, tweeted a photo Monday revealing the mechanical guard had met with a watery end.
“Our D.C. office building got a security robot. It drowned itself,” Farooqui wrote alongside an image of the robot horizontal inside a fountain. “We were promised flying cars, instead we got suicidal robots.”
Read more
Japan just created an amazing new space robot
Japan’s space agency has released photos and videos taken on board the International Space Station (ISS) by its grapefruit-sized robot drone. The drone, called Internal Ball Camera (or Int-Ball), can be maneuvered by controllers and researchers from Earth, according a press release from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
Read more
AI Creates Fake Obama
Artificial intelligence software could generate highly realistic fake videos of former president Barack Obama using existing audio and video clips of him, a new study [PDF] finds.
Such work could one day help generate digital models of a person for virtual reality or augmented reality applications, researchers say.
Computer scientists at the University of Washington previously revealed they could generate digital doppelgängers of anyone by analyzing images of them collected from the Internet, from celebrities such as Tom Hanks and Arnold Schwarzenegger to public figures such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Such work suggested it could one day be relatively easy to create such models of anybody, when there are untold numbers of digital photos of everyone on the Internet.
Read more
Estonia becomes the first country in EU to approve delivery bots
Read about ‘Estonia becomes the first country in EU to approve delivery bots’ on element14.com. Estonia and a number of other countries are ready to embrace delivery bots; other places not so much. Will these adorable bots be rolling down a street.
Read more
Will SpaceX become the world’s biggest telecoms provider? Probably
(This is a followup post to three earlier posts on forecasting. The first in May 2015 forecast both blimp-based and dedicated building-based drone deployments (later patented by Amazon); The second in October 2015 largely predicted Elon Musk’s Tesla Masterplan Part Deux by 9 months, the third in July 2016 among other things correctly hypothesised the use of Model X falcon wings for future possible Tesla bus designs. I try to get it right but I mainly enjoy the idle speculation).
I was recently in San Francisco and had a very random number of drinks with two very friendly employees of US telco AT&T. As is often the case I turned the conversation towards autonomous vehicles, and more specifically two of Elon Musk’s companies, Tesla and SpaceX.
I was curious about how cars, such as a Model S, have much greater data connectivity needs than ever before. Right now, Teslas connect to AT&T’s network and it seems clear that data needs will only increase for data hungry vehicles that drive themselves. Already Tesla cars consume quite a few gigabytes of data per month.
Read more