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Category: robotics/AI

Need a robot with a soft touch? A team of Michigan State University engineers has designed and developed a novel humanoid hand that may be able to help.

In industrial settings, robots often are used for tasks that require repetitive grasping and manipulation of objects. The end of a robot where a human hand would be found is known as an end effector or gripper.

“The novel humanoid hand design is a soft-hard hybrid flexible gripper. It can generate larger grasping than a traditional pure soft hand, and simultaneously be more stable for accurate manipulation than other counterparts used for heavier objects,” said lead author Changyong Cao, director of the Laboratory for Soft Machines and Electronics at MSU and assistant professor in Packaging, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering.

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Researchers at Tel Aviv University, led by Prof. Yaniv Assaf of the School of Neurobiology, Biochemistry and Biophysics and the Sagol School of Neuroscience and Prof. Yossi Yovel of the School of Zoology, the Sagol School of Neuroscience, and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, conducted a first-of-its-kind study designed to investigate brain connectivity in 130 mammalian species. The intriguing results, contradicting widespread conjectures, revealed that brain connectivity levels are equal in all mammals, including humans.

“We discovered that —namely the efficiency of information transfer through the —does not depend on either the size or structure of any specific ,” says Prof. Assaf. “In other words, the brains of all mammals, from tiny mice through humans to large bulls and dolphins, exhibit equal connectivity, and information travels with the same efficiency within them. We also found that the brain preserves this balance via a special compensation mechanism: when connectivity between the hemispheres is high, connectivity within each hemisphere is relatively low, and vice versa.”

Participants included researchers from the Kimron Veterinary Institute in Beit Dagan, the School of Computer Science at TAU and the Technion’s Faculty of Medicine. The paper was published in Nature Neuroscience on June 8.

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Carnegie Mellon today showed off new research into the world of robotic navigation. With help from the team at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), the university has designed a semantic navigation that helps robots navigate around by recognizing familiar objects.

The SemExp system, which beat out Samsung to take first place in a recent Habitat ObjectNav Challenge, utilizes machine learning to train the system to recognize objects. That goes beyond simple superficial traits, however. In the example given by CMU, the robot is able to distinguish an end table from a kitchen table, and thus extrapolate in which room it’s located. That should be more straightforward, however, with a fridge, which is both pretty distinct and is largely restricted to a singe room.

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The pandemic has accelerated demand for robots and automation. Robots have been regulated to marketing jobs, receptionist duties, and companionship for the elderly. But they’re really starting to come into their own and have practical use. Let’s take a look at how.

Supermarkets started to adopt robots to free up employees who previously spent time taking inventory to focus on disinfecting and sanitizing surfaces and processing deliveries to keep shelves stocked.

These retailers insist the robots are augmenting the work of employees, not replacing them. But as panic buying stops and sales decline in the recession, companies may no longer have a need for these workers.

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SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA — NASA scientist Philip Lubin is working on perfecting laser technology that could propel a light spacecraft to Mars in as little as three days.

In order for spacecraft to achieve faster speeds, Lubin proposes using an electromagnetic propulsion system that uses light and radiation, rather than the current fuel-based rocket propulsion system.

Photonic propulsion is a theoretical system that uses the energy and momentum from photons to move objects through space. According to Wired, when photons from a laser array reflect off an object, their energy is translated into a push that’s capable of moving objects like a spacecraft.

The system would currently work best with robotic spacecraft. According to Lubin, a robotic probe with a thin reflective sail could travel to Mars in three days. On the other hand, a manned shuttle could reach Mars in a month using the laser-based system. He estimates that lasers could accelerate spacecraft to 30 percent the speed of light, which was previously unheard of.

Using photonic propulsion, interstellar travel may be possible and sending a probe to Earth’s closest star, Alpha Centauri, could take as little as 15 years, reported Space.com.

In comparison, our current technology takes four to eight months to get to Mars. It took 37 years for the Voyager 1 spacecraft to reach the edge of our solar system.

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Incredible Ai

Ergo Sum

Joshua Feast, CEO of Cogito, told USA Today that he sees the system as more of a coach than a replacement for human employees, who can field dozens of calls from irritated customers every day.

“I don’t think they (human customer agents) will be completely replaced,” Feast told USA Today. “Humans will always want to talk to other humans. The reason is that only other humans really understand us.”

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The first Arab space mission to Mars, an unmanned probe dubbed “Hope”, blasted off from Japan on Monday, in a bid to reveal more about the atmosphere of the Red Planet.

The Japanese rocket carrying the probe developed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Centre in southern Japan right on schedule at 6:58 am local time (2158 GMT Sunday).

The launch of the probe, known as “Al-Amal” in Arabic, had twice been delayed because of bad weather, but the Monday liftoff appeared smooth and successful.

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Ripped from the pages of a sci-fi novel, physicists have crafted a wormhole that tunnels a magnetic field through space.

“This device can transmit the magnetic field from one point in space to another point, through a path that is magnetically invisible,” said study co-author Jordi Prat-Camps, a doctoral candidate in physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. “From a magnetic point of view, this device acts like a wormhole, as if the magnetic field was transferred through an extra special dimension.”

The idea of a wormhole comes from Albert Einstein’s theories. In 1935, Einstein and colleague Nathan Rosen realized that the general theory of relativity allowed for the existence of bridges that could link two different points in space-time. Theoretically these Einstein-Rosen bridges, or wormholes, could allow something to tunnel instantly between great distances (though the tunnels in this theory are extremely tiny, so ordinarily wouldn’t fit a space traveler). So far, no one has found evidence that space-time wormholes actually exist. [Science Fact or Fiction? The Plausibility of 10 Sci-Fi Concepts].

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