Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: robotics/AI – Page 99

“This is a highly engineered design, but the fundamental concepts are fairly simple,” said Dr. Jie Yin. “And with only a single actuation input, our robot can navigate a complex vertical environment.”

What influence can marine life have on robotics? This is what a recent study published in Science Advances hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Virginia and North Carolina State University have developed the fastest swimming soft robot by taking cues from manta ray fins. This study holds the potential to help researchers, engineers, and scientists develop faster and more efficient swimming soft robots that can be used for a variety of purposes worldwide.

This study builds on a 2022 study conducted by this same team of researchers that explored swimming soft robots that exhibited butterfly strokes, achieving a then-record of 3.74 body lengths per second, along with demonstrating high power efficiency, low energy use, and high maneuverability. For this new study, the researchers developed fins used by manta rays with the goal of achieving greater results than before. The fins are flexible when not in use but become rigid when the researchers pumped air into the silicone body that encompasses the soft robot.

In the end, the researchers not only achieved low energy use and maneuverability, but also broke their own record of body lengths per second at 6.8. Additionally, the manta ray-inspired swimming soft robot was able to avoid obstacles, which was an improvement from their 2022 study.

Continue reading “Engineering a Faster, More Efficient Soft Robot with Manta Ray-Inspired Fins” | >

When the brain is observed through imaging, there is a lot of “noise,” which is spontaneous electrical activity that comes from a resting brain. This appears to be different from brain activity that comes from sensory inputs, but just how similar—or different—the noise is from the signal has been a matter of debate.

New research led by a team at the University of Tokyo further untangles the relationship between internally generated noise and stimulus-related patterns in the brain, and finds that the patterns of spontaneous activity and stimulus-evoked response are similar in lower visual areas of the cerebral cortex, but gradually become independent, or “orthogonal,” as one moves from lower to higher visual areas.

The findings not only enhance our understanding of the mechanism that enables the brain to distinguish between signal and noise, but could also provide clues for developing noise-resistant incorporating a mechanism similar to that found in the biological brain. The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Read more | >

On December 5, 2024, the European Space Agency (ESA) achieved a milestone in space exploration with the successful launch of its Proba-3 mission, which aims to create artificial solar eclipses. This revolutionary mission could provide groundbreaking insights into the Sun’s mysterious atmosphere, the corona. By creating artificial eclipses, the two Proba-3 spacecraft will work together to block the Sun’s light, allowing scientists to observe its outer layers like never before. These solar eclipses will provide a close-up view of the corona for the first time, unlocking secrets that were previously beyond our reach.

The Proba-3 mission is built around a remarkable concept: two satellites, the Occulter and the Coronagraph, will fly in precise formation, separated by a distance of 500 feet. This configuration will allow the Occulter to block the Sun’s light and cast a shadow onto the Coronagraph, creating an artificial eclipse in orbit. By mimicking the conditions of a natural solar eclipse, scientists will be able to observe the Sun’s corona for extended periods, up to six hours at a time, far surpassing the fleeting moments provided by natural eclipses on Earth.

This level of precision, described by ESA as “down to the thickness of a fingernail,” is unprecedented in space exploration. The spacecraft rely on a suite of advanced technologies, including GPS, star trackers, lasers, and radio links, to maintain their exact positioning autonomously. This capability allows the spacecraft to operate as though they were a single, integrated observatory, delivering the optical performance required for such ambitious science objectives.

Read more | >

Chinese rivals, including Alibaba and DeepSeek, have released reasoning models like Marco-o1 and R1-Lite-Preview, are encroaching fast, challenging OpenAI’s dominance with open-source solutions and eclipsing o1-preview on certain third-party benchmarks.

These developments reflect the growing demand for large reasoning models (LRMs) capable of handling complex problem-solving tasks.

As OpenAI continues to refine its offerings, the rollout of o1 and ChatGPT Pro marks a milestone in its quest to provide accessible, high-performance AI tools. Whether these developments can maintain OpenAI’s leadership in an increasingly crowded market remains to be seen.

Read more | >

The BBC speaks to residents and travellers in some of the top-ranked countries on the 2024 Global Innovation Index to find out how cutting-edge technology benefits day-to-day life.

With the rise of AI, self-driving cars and wi-fi connected appliances, it can feel like innovation is everywhere these days. But certain countries are known for developing cutting-edge technologies that benefit residents and visitors alike.

To dive into those countries making the most impact in these areas, the World Intellectual Property Organisation recently released its 2024 Global Innovation Index, ranking 130 economies based on measures like their education system, technology infrastructure and knowledge creation (like patents filed or mobile apps created).

Read more | >

MIT engineers have released DrivAerNet++, an open-source dataset of over 8,000 car designs, to accelerate automotive innovation using AI. This dataset, featuring detailed aerodynamic data, aims to enhance fuel efficiency and electric vehicle range, promoting sustainable car design advancements.

Car design is an iterative and proprietary process. Carmakers can spend several years on the design phase for a car, tweaking 3D forms in simulations before building out the most promising designs for physical testing. The details and specs of these tests, including the aerodynamics of a given car design, are typically not made public. Significant advances in performance, such as in fuel efficiency or electric vehicle range, can therefore be slow and siloed from company to company.

MIT engineers say that the search for better car designs can speed up exponentially with the use of generative artificial intelligence tools that can plow through huge amounts of data in seconds and find connections to generate a . While such AI tools exist, the data they would need to learn from have not been available, at least in any sort of accessible, centralized form.

Continue reading “Want to design the car of the future? Here are 8,000 designs to get you started” | >

A team of roboticists at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, working with a colleague from the University of California, has designed, built and demonstrated a bird-like robot that can launch itself into flight using spring-like legs.

The group describes their in a paper published in the journal Nature. Aimy Wissa, an at Princeton University, has published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue suggesting possible ways the innovation could be used in real-world applications.

Some types of drones, such as those with rotors, can rise straight up off the ground—others that are powered with forward-facing or engines that push exhaust out the back must either race along a runway or catapult to get airborne. For this new project, the research team developed a new for getting such craft into the air—jumping using spring-like legs.

Read more | >