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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,521

The Tough Little Drone Ship That Explores Acid Lakes

The Poás Volcano in Costa Rica is home to two crater lakes, and they could not be more different. The first fills an inactive crater, its water is clear blue and its rim lush with vegetation. The other could be accurately described as a hell hole.

Laguna Caliente—literally hot lagoon in Spanish—derives its hellish qualities from the churning of magma underneath the active crater. Sulfur-rich vapor rises out of the lake, gagging anyone unlucky enough to get a whiff and poisoning anyone unlucky enough to get too many whiffs. The water itself is three times as acidic as battery acid. And every once in awhile, a rumbling below shoots a jet of hot, acidic water into the sky. It’s not the kind of place where you want to paddle a boat.

So Guy van Rentergem decided to build a drone boat. Van Rentergem visited Laguna Caliente in 2015 with friends and volcanologists, but he is not a volcanologist himself. However he is a chemist, a constant tinkerer, and a long-time caver who’s worked with geologists in the past. Next year, he told his colleagues, he’s coming back with an autonomous boat so they can map the bottom of the lake.

Apple Just Unveiled A Breakthrough Artificial Intelligence System

Apple live streamed their Worldwide Developers Conference keynote this afternoon. During the talk, they unveiled a new kind of AI system, HopePod.

Today, Apple is holding its Worldwide Developers Conference. So far, they have announced a host of updates. For example, during the presentation, the company noted that their watchOS 4 is going to include advanced AI and be far more personalized.

Roomba creator wants to do for gardens what he did for your floors

Let’s be honest: while planting your garden can be fun, weeding it usually isn’t. Not unless you enjoy crouching down for long stretches, anyway. You might not have to endure the drudgery for too much longer, though. Roomba co-creator Joe Jones and Franklin Robotics are launching Tertill, a robot that weeds your garden all by itself. The machine automatically roams the soil, using sensors to identify small plants (you use collars to protect young crops) and chop them down. It’s solar-powered, so you don’t have to dock it — you can even leave it out in the rain.

In addition to pairing with your phone through Bluetooth, the machine has a USB port to charge during particularly gloomy weeks.

The design does require some careful planning to work properly. You need to space your crops loosely so that the robot can kill weeds in between, and you’ll want to avoid any steep inclines so Tertill doesn’t stuck. There will have to be some kind of basic barrier to prevent the vehicle from wandering away, too. You may also have to rethink how you kill weeds. While you’re probably used to pulling weeds out by the roots, Franklin is counting on its bot repeatedly cutting down weeds until they wither and die.

Scientists slash computations for deep learning

Rice University computer scientists have adapted a widely used technique for rapid data lookup to slash the amount of computation — and thus energy and time — required for deep learning, a computationally intense form of machine learning.

“This applies to any deep-learning architecture, and the technique scales sublinearly, which means that the larger the deep neural network to which this is applied, the more the savings in computations there will be,” said lead researcher Anshumali Shrivastava, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice.

The research will be presented in August at the KDD 2017 conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It addresses one of the biggest issues facing tech giants like Google, Facebook and Microsoft as they race to build, train and deploy massive deep-learning networks for a growing body of products as diverse as self-driving cars, language translators and intelligent replies to emails.

What Happens When Cyborg Tech Goes Beyond Medicine?

The age of the cyborg may be closer than we think. Rapidly improving medical robotics, wearables, and implants means many humans are already part machine, and this trend is only likely to continue.

It is most noticeable in the field of medical prosthetics where high-performance titanium and carbon fiber replacements for limbs have become commonplace. The use of “blades” by Paralympians has even raised questions over whether they actually offer an advantage over biological limbs.

For decades, myoelectric prosthetics—powered artificial limbs that read electrical signals from the muscles to allow the user to control the device—have provided patients with mechanical replacements for lost hands.

Space station welcomes 1st returning vehicle since shuttle

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The International Space Station welcomed its first returning vehicle in years Monday — a SpaceX Dragon capsule making its second delivery.

Space shuttle Atlantis was the last repeat visitor six years ago. It’s now a museum relic at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

NASA astronaut Jack Fischer noted “the special significance” of SpaceX’s recycling effort as soon as he caught the Dragon supply ship with the station’s big robot arm.

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