Science
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Business
Flippy 2, a robotic fry station from California-based Miso Robotics, has been newly deployed in a Chicago White Castle location.
Machine Learning Research
A new machine learning method aims to improve a machine’s ability to determine and locate points of interest.