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Category: robotics/AI

Professor Nick Bostrom briefed political representatives from around the world on the national and international security risks posed by artificial intelligence and other future technologies at a UN event last week.

Professor Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford Martin School, was invited to speak at a special side event examining the challenges posed by chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) materials and weapons, held during the UN’s 2015 General Assembly meeting.

The event was organised by Georgia’s UN representatives, in collaboration with the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI), with the aim of understanding the implications of new technologies, ensuring responsible development and mitigating against misuse.

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A team of researchers from Japan’s Chiba Institute of Technology recently presented a novel robot design at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. It can be thrown like the Explorer camera sphere, but after it stops rolling, this nimble quadruped unfurls mechanical legs to skitter the rest of the way to its destination — basically the same idea as Star Wars’ Droideka, just without the laser cannons (yet).

The robot is called the QRoSS. The second iteration, shown above, employs a 30 cm protective shell. It uses this shell mostly as a passive shock absorber, akin to a robotic roll cage. And since the legs operate independently from the outer structure, the robot can easily navigate rough and uneven terrain at speeds reaching 0.1 meter per second without fear of falling over. Even if it does, the cage will take the brunt of the damage, not the delicate machinery inside. This setup therefore could be employed in emergencies by first responders to scout ahead of rescue teams operating in damaged or structurally unsound buildings.

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Mars RobotNASA has announced the continuation of a two-phase $750,000 research award to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and project partner Honeybee Robotics to develop a small integrated autonomous robotic spacecraft system to support the exploration and mining of asteroids and other planetary bodies and moons.

Dr. Hever Moncayo and Dr. Richard Prazenica, both Assistant Professors of Aerospace Engineering in the College of Engineering are leading the effort at the Daytona Beach Campus. Also collaborating on this project is Dr. Sergey Drakunov, Professor of Engineering Physics in the Physical Sciences Department and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Kris Zacny is the team lead for Honeybee Robotics.

The Embry-Riddle team includes Aerospace Engineering master’s degree students Diego Garcia, Chirag Jain, Andres Chavez, Wai Leuk Law, Aerospace Engineering Ph.D. student Andres Perez and Engineering Physics Ph.D. student Samuel Kitchen-McKinley. The researchers are focusing on an innovative concept based on autonomous small free-flyer prospector spacecraft that can leave from, return and recharge from a mothership on the planet’s or asteroid’s surface.

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Tesla’s latest software update is slated to roll out worldwide this week. Here’s what it will do.

Tesla Motors, the electric automaker, plans to roll out its latest software upgrade—version 7, which includes autopilot features—worldwide to owners of its Model S sedan on Thursday.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk made the announcement via a tweet this weekend. He also answered some of his Twitter followers’ questions about the new software.

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“Vicarious, the mysterious company that’s been funded by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and actor Ashton Kutcher, wants to do something completely radical — build the world’s first human-level artificial intelligence (AI).”

Smarter than Siri and Cortana.

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Seventeen years ago, Helen Greiner was scrambling to find investors to back her company’s development of a robot that would clean people’s houses. As she made the rounds of venture capitalists, the responses ranged from “You’re not an Internet company” to “You’re too early stage” to “I would do this, but my partners would kill me.”

But Greiner and her partners, Colin Angle and MIT robotics professor Rodney Brooks, persevered, funneling money from their firm’s contract engineering work to fund the robot project. Today, that company, iRobot Corp. of Bedford, is one of the nation’s largest makers of home robots, generating more than $500 million in annual sales from its Roomba floor vacuum and other products, and employing 600 people, including 500 in Massachusetts.

iRobot is an anchor of a burgeoning Massachusetts robotics industry that includes more than 100 companies, employs more than 3,000, and attracts tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars of investments. Since 2008, at least 20 robotics startups have launched in Massachusetts. Venture capital funding of the local industry tripled to more than $60 million in 2012, the most recent year available, from less than $20 million in 2008, according to the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, a trade group in Burlington.

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TRIKALA, Greece (AP) — There’ll be no arguing with the driver on this bus: the rides are free and there’s no driver anyway.

Trikala, a rural town in northern Greece, has been chosen to test a driverless bus in real traffic conditions for the first time, part of a European project to revolutionize mass transport and wean its cities off oil dependency over the next 30 years.

Trials of the French-built CityMobil2 buses started last week and will last through late February.

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