Chinese researchers have developed a robot designed to help doctors treat the new coronavirus and other highly contagious diseases.
The machine has a long robotic arm attached to a base with wheels. It can perform some of the same medical examination tasks as doctors. For example, the device can perform ultrasounds, collect fluid samples from a person’s mouth and listen to sounds made by a patient’s organs.
Cameras record the robot’s activities, which are controlled remotely so doctors can avoid coming in close contact with infected patients. Doctors and other medical workers can operate the machine from a nearby room, or from much farther away.
A group of Chinese researchers has developed a compact, sabre-like antenna for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can switch between two radiation patterns for better communication coverage. They describe their work in a study published 26 February in IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation.
For UAVs cruising at high speeds, it’s desirable to have small, aerodynamic antennas that limit drag but can still yield sufficient bandwidth and coverage. Zhijun Zhang, a researcher at Tsinghua University, notes that sabre-shaped antennas are beneficial in the sense that they are very aerodynamic—but there is a major limitation that comes with this design.
“Conventional sabre-like antennas generate a donut-shape radiation pattern, which provides an omnidirectional coverage and is ideal for air-to-ground communication. However, a donut-shape pattern has a null at its zenith,” Zhang explains.
This month, an international team put all of those ingredients together, turning theory into reality.
The three labs, scattered across Padova, Italy, Zurich, Switzerland, and Southampton, England, collaborated to create a fully self-controlled, hybrid artificial-biological neural network that communicated using biological principles, but over the internet.
The three-neuron network, linked through artificial synapses that emulate the real thing, was able to reproduce a classic neuroscience experiment that’s considered the basis of learning and memory in the brain. In other words, artificial neuron and synapse “chips” have progressed to the point where they can actually use a biological neuron intermediary to form a circuit that, at least partially, behaves like the real thing.
DARPA has entered into a partnership with Northrop Grumman subsidiary Space Logistics LLC to develop robotic technologies for servicing and extending the service lives of orbital satellites. Based on the Mission Extension Vehicle-1 (MEV-1), which recently docked with a communication satellite in geosynchronous orbit, the technology will be used by the agency’s Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) program to develop a dexterous robotic servicer that would be operated by private companies.
Founded in 2016, the RSGS program completed a Payload Critical Design Review in 2019 and is developing key technologies in the run up to the first space launch scheduled for 2023. As part of this effort, DARPA says it is funding the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) to bring together components like the robotic manipulator arms, a variety of interchangeable tools, cameras, sensors, software, and avionics into a functioning robotic payload.
Meanwhile, Space Logistics will provide the spacecraft bus based on the MEV and integrate the robotic payload, as well as providing launch and orbital operation services. Once the spacecraft has been checked out and demonstrated its capabilities, the technology will be marketed to commercial and government organizations.
In the end, an audience poll voted in favor of the pro-AI side, but just barely; 51.2 percent of voters felt convinced that AI can help us more than it can hurt us.
The software’s natural language processing was able to identify racist, obscene, or otherwise inappropriate comments and weed them out as being irrelevant to the debate. But it also repeated the same arguments multiple times, and mixed up a statement about bias as being pro-AI rather than anti-AI.
IBM has been working on Project Debater for over six years, and though it aims to iron out small glitches like these, the system’s goal isn’t to ultimately outwit and defeat humans. On the contrary, the AI is meant to support our decision-making by taking in and processing huge amounts of information in a nuanced way, more quickly than we ever could.
