Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,
I’ve covered a wide variety of potential crises over the years.
These include natural disasters, pandemics, social unrest and financial collapse. That’s a daunting list.
Category: robotics/AI – Page 714
AIOC2020 — GP101 — Use Of Artificial Intelligence In Preventing Diabetes …
Main speaker — dr. rajiv raman
BMW Putting Humanoid Robots to Work in Its Factory
BMW has signed an unprecedented deal with the robotics firm Figure to bring general-purpose humanoid robots into its factories.
See the humanoid robots that will build new BMWs
This can free humans from taking on those tedious — and potentially dangerous — jobs, but it also means manufacturers need to build or buy a new robot every time they find a new task they want to automate.
General purpose robots — ones that can do many tasks — would be far more useful, but developing a bot with anywhere near the versatility of a human worker has thus far proven out of reach.
What’s new? Figure thinks it has cracked the code — in March 2023, it unveiled Figure 1, a machine it said was “the world’s first commercially viable general purpose humanoid robot.”
Scientists design a two-legged robot powered by muscle tissue
Compared to robots, human bodies are flexible, capable of fine movements, and can convert energy efficiently into movement. Drawing inspiration from human gait, researchers from Japan crafted a two-legged biohybrid robot by combining muscle tissues and artificial materials. Published on January 26 in the journal Matter, this method allows the robot to walk and pivot.
“Research on biohybrid robots, which are a fusion of biology and mechanics, is recently attracting attention as a new field of robotics featuring biological function,” says corresponding author Shoji Takeuchi of the University of Tokyo, Japan. “Using muscle as actuators allows us to build a compact robot and achieve efficient, silent movements with a soft touch.”
The research team’s two-legged robot, an innovative bipedal design, builds on the legacy of biohybrid robots that take advantage of muscles. Muscle tissues have driven biohybrid robots to crawl and swim straight forward and make turns—but not sharp ones. Yet, being able to pivot and make sharp turns is an essential feature for robots to avoid obstacles.
Adaptive Mobile Manipulation for Articulated Objects in the Open World
Paper page: https://huggingface.co/papers/2401.14403 https://open-world-mobilemanip.github.io/ Deploying robots in open-ended unstructured environments such as homes has been a long-standing research problem.