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Category: robotics/AI – Page 744

US ditches LIDAR, develops self-driving stealth tech to tackle lasers

Researchers at the US Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) have developed camera-based autonomous driving tools that can work without deploying technologies like LIDAR and RADAR.

The technology can potentially deliver stealth capabilities for the military while finding applications in space and agriculture.

Modern autonomous driving solutions rely extensively on light detection and ranging (LIDAR) sensors to visualize objects around the vehicle. A software solution then identifies the objects nearby and helps the vehicle’s computer decide whether to halt or slow down.

Claude 3 Haiku: our fastest model yet

Anthropic releases Claude 3 Haiku Claude 3 Haiku is three times faster than its peers for the vast majority of workloads, processing 21K tokens (~30 pages) per second for prompts under 32K tokens.

Anthropic releases Claude 3 Haiku.

Claude 3 Haiku is three times faster than its peers for the vast majority of workloads, processing 21K tokens (~30 pages) per second for prompts under 32K tokens.

Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that’s working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

Bear Robotics, a robot waiter startup, just picked up $60M from LG

LG Electronics may no longer be a household name in smartphones, but it still sees a big future in gadgets like robots. Today, the company confirmed a $60 million investment in Bear Robotics, the California startup that makes artificial intelligence–powered server robots (autonomous tray towers on wheels that are meant to replace waiters) for restaurants and other venues. With the investment, LG Electronics becomes Bear’s largest shareholder.

Bear’s last fundraise in 2022 valued the company at just over $490 million post-money, per PitchBook data. It’s not clear what the valuation is for this latest investment, but the last year has not been a great one for startups in the space.

On the other hand, the current vogue for all things AI, and the general advances that are coming with that, are giving robotics players a fillip — see yesterday’s Covariant news, for another example. Still, it’s not clear what Bear hopes to tackle next with the basic trays-on-wheels form factor that it has adopted for its flagship Servi robots.

New traffic signal would improve travel time for both pedestrians and vehicles, says modeling study

Adding a fourth light to traffic signals—in addition to red, green, and yellow—would shorten wait times at street corners for pedestrians, as well as improve traffic flow for both autonomous vehicles and human drivers. And the more autonomous vehicles there are in the traffic network, the shorter the wait times for everyone.

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