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Category: robotics/AI – Page 744

Imagine a person on the ground guiding an airborne drone that harnesses its energy from a laser beam, eliminating the need for carrying a bulky onboard battery.

That is the vision of a group of CU Boulder scientists from the Hayward Research Group. In a new study, the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering researchers have developed a novel and resilient photomechanical material that can transform light energy into mechanical work without heat or electricity, offering innovative possibilities for energy-efficient, wireless and remotely controlled systems. Its wide-ranging potential spans across diverse industries, including robotics, aerospace and biomedical devices.

In a new study published in Nature Materials, the Hayward Research Group has developed a novel and resilient photomechanical material that can transform light energy into mechanical work without heat or electricity. The photomechanical materials offer a promising alternative to electrically-wired actuators, with the potential to wirelessly control or power robots or vehicles, such as powering a drone with a laser beam instead of a bulky on-board battery.

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Adeel Razi, a computational neuroscientist at Monash University and a fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) who was not involved in the new paper, says that is a valuable step. “We’re all starting the discussion rather than coming up with answers.”

Until recently, machine consciousness was the stuff of science fiction movies such as Ex Machina. “When Blake Lemoine was fired from Google after being convinced by LaMDA, that marked a change,” Long says. “If AIs can give the impression of consciousness, that makes it an urgent priority for scientists and philosophers to weigh in.” Long and philosopher Patrick Butlin of the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute organized two workshops on how to test for sentience in AI.

For one collaborator, computational neuroscientist Megan Peters at the University of California, Irvine, the issue has a moral dimension. “How do we treat an AI based on its probability of consciousness? Personally this is part of what compels me.”

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The popularity of remote food delivery skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the trend has continued to help businesses thrive years later. Unfortunately, some of the robotic delivery vehicles are taking a beating, with several viral videos showing people kicking the autonomous bots over and even stealing the products inside.
KTLA 5’s Rachel Menitoff reports. (Aug. 7, 2023)

KTLA 5 News — Keeping Southern Californians informed since 1947.

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The new study, published in Nature, showed that the unassuming protein is far from a one-trick pony. Rather than a simple protein cog in the body’s wound-healing machine, PF4 also acts as an ambassador between the brain and the immune system. When young, the protein “gatekeeper” tunes down inflammation and helps maintain the brain’s cognitive functions.

Unfortunately, PF4 levels in the body nosedive with age. The drop incites a spark of inflammation in the brain’s “memory center”—the hippocampus—and hampers the neurons’ ability to communicate. Neural networks misfire. As does memory: an aged animal struggles to remember new places or learn new tasks.

It’s not all bad news. In one test, a jab of PF4 partially reset the body’s immune system, lowering levels of proteins that promote inflammation, and boosted cognition in elderly mice.

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The chief technology officer of a robotics startup told me earlier this year, “We thought we’d have to do a lot of work to build ‘ChatGPT for robotics.’ Instead, it turns out that, in a lot of cases, ChatGPT is ChatGPT for robotics.”

Until recently, AI models were specialized tools. Using AI in a particular area, like robotics, meant spending time and money creating AI models specifically and only for that area. For example, Google’s AlphaFold, an AI model for predicting protein folding, was trained using protein structure data and is only useful for working with protein structures.

So this founder thought that to benefit from generative AI, the robotics company would need to create its own specialized generative AI models for robotics. Instead, the team discovered that for many cases, they could use off-the-shelf ChatGPT for controlling their robots without the AI having ever been specifically trained for it.

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