Business
One Cool Robot: FamilyMart Uses TX SCAR Robots to Restock Beverages
FamilyMart, a chain of Japanese convenience stores, plans to employ robots to fill shelves with beverage bottles at 300 locations.
Robotics
Machine Learning Research
Humanized Training for Robot Arms: New Research Improves Robot Performance and Adaptability
Robots trained via reinforcement learning usually study videos of robots performing the task at hand. A new approach used videos of humans to pre-train robotic arms.
Science
More Autonomy for Martian Drone: NASA Upgrades Ingenuity Rover's Navigation Algorithm
The United States space agency is upgrading the system that pilots its helicopter on the Red Planet. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that Ingenuity, a drone sent to Mars as part of its 2020 mission to Mars, will receive a new collision-avoidance algorithm.
Tech & Society
Ethics Team Scuttles Taser Drone: Axon Cancels Plans to Sell a Taser Drone
A weaponized AI system intended to protect students has been grounded. Axon, which makes law-enforcement equipment such as tasers and body cameras, canceled a plan to sell remote-controlled drones capable of firing electroshock darts.
Tech & Society
One Model, Hundreds of Tasks: Multimodal Transformer Performs Over 600 Different Tasks
Researchers took a step toward achieving a longstanding goal: One model that performs a whole lot of very different tasks. Scott Reed, Konrad Żołna, Emilio Parisotto and a team at DeepMind announced Gato.
Tech & Society
Nurse’s Mechanical Helper: Inside the Moxi AI-Powered Hospital Robot
Hospitals are using robots to lighten the load on clinical staff. A number of U.S. hospitals are using Moxi, a robot from Diligent Robotics, to ferry supplies, lab specimens, soiled laundry, and other items.
Machine Learning Research
Coordinating Robot Limbs: Machine learning improves robot dog reaction time.
A dog doesn’t think twice about fetching a tennis ball, but an autonomous robot typically suffers from delays between perception and action. A new machine-learning model helped a quadruped robot coordinate its sensors and actuators.
Tech & Society
Robots Don’t Want Human Jobs: Countries with high automation have more jobs.
Research challenges long-held assumptions about how automation will affect employment. Studies in various countries found that automation is associated with more jobs, fewer working hours , and higher productivity.
Machine Learning Research
Transformers See in 3D: Using transformers to visualize depth in 2D images.
Visual robots typically perceive the three-dimensional world through sequences of two-dimensional images, but they don’t always know what they’re looking at. For instance, Tesla’s self-driving system has been known to mistake a full moon for a traffic light.
Business
Robots in the Workplace: Google uses robot janitors to clean up offices.
Machines are doing light janitorial work in the uncontrolled environment of Google’s offices. Everyday Robots, a new spin-out from Google’s experimental X Development division, unleashed 100 robots to perform an array of cleanup tasks.
Interviews & Essays
Alexei Efros: Learning from the ground up
Things are really starting to get going in the field of AI. After many years (decades?!) of focusing on algorithms, the AI community is finally ready to accept the central role of data and the high-capacity models that are capable of taking advantage of this data.
Interviews & Essays
Wolfram Burgard: Train robots in the real world
Robots are tremendously useful machines, and I would like to see them applied to every task where they can do some good. Yet we don’t have enough programmers for all this hardware and all these tasks.