Now, Stanford engineers have created a new robotic hand, designed with finger pads that can grip like a gecko in order to be able to grip at just the right strength, according to the publication in Science Robotics.
“Anthropomorphic robotic manipulators have high grasp mobility and task flexibility but struggle to match the practical strength of parallel jaw grippers. Gecko-inspired adhesives are a promising technology to span that gap in performance, but three key principles must be maintained for their efficient usage: high contact area, shear load sharing, and evenly distributed normal stress,” write the authors in their study. “This work presents an anthropomorphic end effector that combines those adhesive principles with the mobility and stiffness of a multiphalange, multifinger design.”
Now their company, Sanas, is testing out artificial intelligence-powered software that aims to eliminate miscommunication by changing people’s accents in real time. A call center worker in the Philippines, for example, could speak normally into the microphone and end up sounding more like someone from Kansas to a customer on the other end.
Call centers, the startup’s founders say, are only the beginning. The company’s website touts its plans as “Speech, Reimagined.”
Eventually, they hope the app they’re developingwill be used by a variety of industries and individuals. It could help doctors better understand patients, they say, or help grandchildren better understand their grandparents.
Yiran Sherry’s waters broke while the family was stuck in traffic. With contractions increasing rapidly and traffic barely moving, the couple realized they were not going to make it in time.
Keating Sherry placed the vehicle on autopilot after setting the navigation system to the hospital, 20 minutes away in the western suburb of Paoli.
He said he laid one hand gently on the car’s steering wheel as he attended to his wife.
It may have seemed like an obscure United Nations conclave, but a meeting this week in Geneva was followed intently by experts in artificial intelligence, military strategy, disarmament and humanitarian law.
The reason for the interest? Killer robots — drones, guns and bombs that decide on their own, with artificial brains, whether to attack and kill — and what should be done, if anything, to regulate or ban them.
Once the domain of science fiction films like the “Terminator” series and “RoboCop,” killer robots, more technically known as Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, have been invented and tested at an accelerated pace with little oversight. Some prototypes have even been used in actual conflicts.
Researchers at Toyota Central R&D Labs have recently created an insect-scale aerial robot with flapping wings, powered using wireless radiofrequency technology. This robot, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, is based on a radiofrequency power receiver with a remarkable power-to-weight density of 4,900 W kg-1.
“Small drones typically have a very limited operating time due to their power source,” Takashi Ozaki, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “The purpose of our recent research was to overcome this limitation. Currently, no-contact power supply using electromagnetic waves has been put to practical use in various products, but it was unknown how far it could be applied to small flying robots.”
The main objective of the recent study by Ozaki and his colleagues was to power an insect-size flying robot using no-contact, wireless charging technology. The robot created by the researchers is essentially comprised of a flapping, piezoelectric actuator that is powered through a 5 GHz dipole antenna.
MIT Media Lab researchers offer positive use cases of AI-generated synthetic characters for education and well-being. A new paper provides an open-source, easy-to-use pipeline that combines AI-generated models to create synthetic characters with facial gestures, voice, and motion.
With an end goal of turning deserts into lush green landscapes, A’seedbot drives around autonomously using solar energy, and planting seeds in the sand.
Lightelligence, a Boston-based photonics company, revealed the world’s first small form-factor, photonics-based computing device, meaning it uses light to perform compute operations. The company claims the unit is “hundreds of times faster than a typical computing unit, such as NVIDIA RTX 3080.” 350 times faster, to be exact, but that only applies to certain types of applications.
However, the PACE achieves that coveted specialization through an added field of computing — which not only makes the system faster, it makes it incredibly more efficient. While traditional semiconductor systems have the issue of excess heat that results from running current through nanometre-level features at sometimes ludicrous frequencies, the photonic system processes its workloads with zero Ohmic heating — there’s no heat produced from current resistance. Instead, it’s all about light.
Lightelligence is built around its CEO’s Ph.d. thesis — and the legitimacy it provides. This is so because when “Deep Learning with Coherent Nanophotonic Circuits” was published in Nature in 2017, Lightelligence’s CEO and founder Yichen Chen had already foreseen a path for optical circuits to be at the forefront of Machine Learning computing efforts. By 2020, the company had already received $100 million in funding and employed around 150 employees. A year later, Lightspeed has achieved a dem product that it says is “hundreds of times faster than a typical computing unit, such as NVIDIA RTX 3080”. 350 times faster, to be clear.
The PACE’s debut aims to charm enough capital to comfortably reach its goal of launching a pilot AI accelerator product to the market in 2022. That’s still only a stretch goal in the company’s vision, however, its goal is to develop and distribute a mass-market, photonics-based hardware solution as early as 2023, targeting the Cloud AI, Finance, and Retail markets. Considering how Lightelligence managed to improve the company’s 2019 COMET design performance by a factor of a million with PACE in a span of two years, it’ll be interesting to see where their efforts take them when it comes to launching.
