The Shanghai-based company plans to begin mass production of its GR-1 robot by end of 2023 and deliver thousands of units next yearFourier hopes to collaborate with major AI companies to work on the ‘brain’ of its bipedal robot.

When Fourier Intelligence unveiled its lanky, jet-black humanoid robot GR-1 at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai in July, it instantly stole the show.

While the global technology community has been fixated on artificial intelligence (AI) software since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November, the Chinese-made GR-1 – said to be capable of walking on two legs at a speed of 5km an hour while carrying a 50kg load – reminded people of the… More.

---

The CEO of Fourier Intelligence discusses his plans and vision for the GR-1 humanoid robot, which stole the show at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai last month.

It’s revolutionising building – but could AI kill off an entire profession? Perhaps not, finds our writer, as he enters a world where Corbusier-style marvels and 500-room hotels are just a click away.

Imagine walking into your local place of worship, finding your seat, and getting ready to hear a sermon. But instead of your familiar priest, minister, or rabbi, a robot steps up to deliver the day’s message. It might sound like science fiction, but it’s becoming a real possibility in some parts of the world.

Can a machine really lead a religious service? Would people accept a robot as a spiritual guide? A new study decided to find out, and the results might surprise you.

Gal Frenkel built a wooden deck and pool in the backyard of his home in central Israel the summer after he had sold luxury wedding/bar mitzvah event planner Sky Productions (opening price for an event: $1 million).

Frenkel hosted a few parties there, and after the summer he didn’t think much about his pool and deck. When he went out to look at it the following spring, he was shocked.

“The whole area looked old and ruined and faded. I was so disappointed,” he tells ISRAEL21c. “I called the guy who installed the deck and said, ‘Nadav, you really messed it up.’ He started laughing. ‘Decks need ongoing maintenance,’ he explained. So, I asked him, ‘Can you do that for me?’ ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘The price will be 10,000 shekels.’”

Modular robots—robotic systems that can adapt their body configuration to change locomotion style or move on different terrains—can be highly advantageous for tackling missions in diverse environments. Over the past decade or so, engineers have developed a wide range of modular robots that rely on different designs and underlying mechanisms.

A research team at Westlake University and Zhejiang University in China recently introduced a new modular robot design inspired by the paper-folding art of origami, specifically by an origami fold known as the Kresling pattern. Their design, introduced in a paper in Nature Communications, relies on newly introduced, universally deformable modules that can be rearranged to create different shapes and configurations.

“There have been some efforts to use Kresling pattern to develop multimode robotic arms,” Hanquing Jiang, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “However, the existing methods are purely based the Kresling pattern itself; thus, the deformation modes are limited by the coupled twisting and contraction mode. The primary objective is to modify the classical Kresling pattern and to generate new deformation modes.”