Pieter Werner

Global semiconductor revenue is projected to grow 16.8% in 2024 to total $624 billion, according to the latest forecast from Gartner. In 2023, the market is forecast to decline 10.9% and reach $534 billion.

 Inspired by a small and slow snail, scientists have developed a robot protype that may one day scoop up microplastics from the surfaces of oceans, seas and lakes. The robot’s design is based on the Hawaiian apple snail (Pomacea canaliculate), a common aquarium snail that uses the undulating motion of its foot to drive water surface flow and suck in floating food particles.

Seeing robots made with soft, flexible parts in action appears to lower people’s anxiety about working with them or even being replaced by them. A Washington State University study found that watching videos of a soft robot working with a person at picking and placing tasks lowered the viewers’ safety concerns and feelings of job insecurity.

Realtime Robotics, provider of collision-free autonomous motion planning for industrial robots, announced that it has partnered with HLS Engineering Group, a business associate in the field of integrated engineering, with expertise in the fields of manufacturing, mechanical engineering and robotic automation. 

Researchers at Princeton University, in collaboration with Google, have developed a novel method to enhance the decision-making capabilities of robots. This technique teaches robots to recognize their own uncertainty and seek human assistance when necessary.

Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are poised to become a part of everyday life by the 2040s. This prediction comes from Associate Professor Mohit Shivdasani from the department of biomedical engineering at UNSW Sydney.

The face of holiday park services in the Netherlands is changing as visitors at Landal GreenParks now find a robot welcoming them among the staff. Since joining the team in November, Clevon’s delivery robot has supported the parks team by delivering and collecting linen to and from the recreation homes in the holiday park.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and NVIDIA have announced an expanded strategic collaboration aimed at delivering infrastructure, software, and services to support generative artificial intelligence (AI) innovations. The collaboration combes NVIDIA’s latest multi-node systems with advanced GPUs, CPUs, and AI software with AWS’s virtualization and security capabilities, Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) interconnect, and UltraCluster scalability. 

Transformational technologies, including AI-augmented software engineering (AIASE), AI coding assistants and platform engineering, will reach mainstream adoption in 2-5 years, according to the Gartner Hype Cycle for Software Engineering, 2023.

A new kind of artificial seed to sense environmental parameters without impacting on the health of environment is the invention coming from the IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) in Genova, Italy. The soft robot, named Acer i-Seed, is inspired by natural Acer seeds and can monitor the temperature of the soil by becoming luminescent. It is made of a biocompatible and compostable material, and it has been realized with 3D printing technologies. A drone can be used to spread them out in large areas and study the terrain at a distance.