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Category: robotics/AI – Page 471

Introducing AutoRT, SARA-RT and RT-Trajectory to improve real-world robot data collection, speed, and generalization.

Picture a future in which a simple request to your personal helper robot — “tidy the house” or “cook us a delicious, healthy meal” — is all it takes to get those jobs done. These tasks, straightforward for humans, require a high-level understanding of the world for robots.

Today we’re announcing a suite of advances in robotics research that bring us a step closer to this future. AutoRT, SARA-RT, and RT-Trajectory build on our historic Robotics Transformers work to help robots make decisions faster, and better understand and navigate their environments.

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Southern Company has a historic commitment to energy innovation. Since the 1960s, the company has invested well over $2 billion in research and development (R&D), and currently, their employees are on the forefront of delivering new ideas to build the future of energy.

Enter Spot—an agile robot. Chethan Acharya, a principal research engineer within Southern Company R&D, first discovered Spot on social media.

At the time, Acharya’s job was to find and test new sensors, analytics tools, and other solutions to help Southern Company improve operations and maintenance (O&M) activities while also lowering costs.

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The commercial space industry recently received a boost after NASA awarded 10 small businesses up to $150,000 each as part of NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Ignite program, granting each company six months to demonstrate the viability and additional standards of their mission proposals. This funding comes as part of the second round of Phase I awards and holds the potential to continue the development of the commercial space industry for the short-and long-term.

“The investments we’re able to offer through SBIR Ignite give us the ability to de-risk technologies that have a strong commercial pull, helping make them more attractive to outside investors, customers, and partners,” said Jason L. Kessler, who is the Program Executive for the NASA SBIR & Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Program. “We also hope it advances the sometimes-overlooked goal of all SBIR programs to increase private-sector commercialization of the innovations derived from federal research and development funding.”

The 10 companies selected for this latest round of funding include (in alphabetical order): Astral Forge LLC, Astrobotic Technology Inc., Benchmark Space Systems, Brayton Energy LLC, Channel-Logistics LLC dba Space-Eyes, GeoVisual Analytics, Lunar Resources Inc., Space Lab Technologies LLC, Space Tango, and VerdeGo Aero.

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Qualcomm extends its presence in AI inference processing, began with its Cloud AI 100 series accelerators, with the launch of its new Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Ultra.

While Qualcomm’s Cloud AI 100 accelerator family has long been available from several tier-one technology providers such as Lenovo, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Inventec, Foxconn, Gigabyte, and Asus, it’s starting to see deployment in the public cloud.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently introduced its first Qualcomm-based accelerated instance type, the DL2q, featuring the Qualcomm Cloud AI 100. While the new instance type can be used for general inference applications, the companies highlight the accelerator’s specific applicability in developing automotive ADAS and related applications – an area in which Qualcomm is rapidly expanding its presence.

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