Robotics/AI – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Sep 17
2015

Roomba advances robot intelligence with a model that can map your house and remember where it’s cleaned

The future of household robots owes a lot to 19th century American explorers Lewis and Clark.

At least, that’s what iRobot CEO Colin Angle told a crowd of reporters at a press event in New York on Sept. 16, introducing the Roomba 980, iRobot’s newest trashcan-lid-shaped vacuuming robot. It may look like every other Roomba the company has released over the past decade or so, but this one has a new trick: It knows how to map out its surroundings and find its way home.

“Roomba’s mission is to clean, which is not as exciting as Lewis and Clark,” Angle said, “But nonetheless very important.”

Sep 17
2015

Mercedes-Benz announces plans to develop luxury driverless cars

CEO of parent company, Damiler, says Mercedes premium driverless cars are a ‘concrete development goal’.

Sep 17
2015

Japan’s Friendly Robot Is Getting a Snarky Attitude Adjustment For Americans

The Japanese humanoid robot Pepper, which sold out of its first 1,000 units in one minute in Japan this June, will get a personality makeover for the US market: it’ll go from cute and bubbly to snarky and sarcastic, MIT Technology Review reports.

Editor Will Knight met a Pepper unit in Boston this week, and reported back some very distinct changes in the robot’s personality designed to make it more appealing to Americans: High fives instead of bows; smartass swipes instead of songs. In the MIT report, Knight said he asked an Americanized Pepper if it’s like Terminator, to which it responded: “Do I really have to answer that?”

Pepper is a robot that’s designed to recognize human emotions, and is supposed to read social situations so it can interact with you like a person can. And since people already ask Siri questions that get sassy comebacks, Pepper’s gotta be ready.

Sep 15
2015

Deep Learning Machine Teaches Itself Chess in 72 Hours, Plays at International Master Level

In a world first, an artificial intelligence machine plays chess by evaluating the board rather than using brute force to work out every possible move.

Sep 15
2015

Boeing rolls out R2-D2-themed 787 Dreamliner

If there’s one thing R2-D2 knows, it’s flying. The astromech droid has provided air support for both Anakin and Luke Skywalker who know a few things about piloting.

However, the blue and white robot’s next flight will be on Earth thanks to the newly themed Boeing 787 Dreamliner made to look like the lovable Star Wars staple. Here’s hoping that the flights are more comfortable than some of R2’s space dog fights or dodgy landings on Dagobah.

Starting on October 18, Japanese carrier ANA will fly the newly minted plane between Tokyo and Vancouver before extending the service to include Munich, Paris, Seattle, Sydney and beyond. The 215-seater plane isn’t just Star Wars-y on the outside, though. In addition to featuring all six Star Wars films on the seat back screens, the cups, headsets, and napkins will also carry the theme on inside.

Sep 15
2015

Sex robots should be banned because they will harm humanity, say campaigners

The Campaign Against Sex Robots

Companies should be stopped from developing sex robots with artificial intelligence for fear of harming humanity, according to campaigners.

Many engineers are looking to add artificial intelligence to sex toys and dolls in an attempt to make them more like humans, and therefore more attractive to customers. But such moves are unethical and will harm humanity, according to a new campaign.

The Campaign Against Sex Robots, launched this week, says that the “increasing effort” that has gone into producing sex robots — “machines in the form of women or children for use as sex objects, substitutes for human partners or prostitutes” — is harmful and makes society more unequal.

Sep 14
2015

Former Hyundai CEO Will Lead Google’s Self-Driving Car Initiative

John Krafcik takes the wheel.

Sep 14
2015

Intelligent Machines: The jobs robots will steal first

“Martin Ford — author of Rise of the Robots — thinks we face mass unemployment and economic collapse unless we make radical changes, such as offering humans a basic wage, a guaranteed income.”

We are on the cusp of a revolution in the way we work so move over and make room for the robots.

Sep 14
2015

DARPA demonstrates robotic landing gear for helicopters

Helicopters are versatile machines capable of all manner of maneuvers in the air, but when it comes to takeoffs and landings they are very fussy creatures, preferring flat, level pads, which are scarce in combat and rescue missions. DARPA recently demonstrated a new robotic landing gear system in an unmanned flight near Atlanta, Georgia, that’s designed to overcome these limitations by enabling landings on broken or uneven terrain with a high degree of safety.

Sep 14
2015

System learns to distinguish words’ phonetic components, without human annotation of training data

Every language has its own collection of phonemes, or the basic phonetic units from which spoken words are composed. Depending on how you count, English has somewhere between 35 and 45. Knowing a language’s phonemes can make it much easier for automated systems to learn to interpret speech.

In the 2015 volume of Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, MIT researchers describe a new machine-learning system that, like several systems before it, can learn to distinguish spoken words. But unlike its predecessors, it can also learn to distinguish lower-level phonetic units, such as syllables and phonemes.

As such, it could aid in the development of speech-processing systems for languages that are not widely spoken and don’t have the benefit of decades of linguistic research on their phonetic systems. It could also help make speech-processing systems more portable, since information about lower-level phonetic units could help iron out distinctions between different speakers’ pronunciations.