Bots & Brains

The digital revolution is built on a foundation of invisible 1s and 0s called bits. As decades pass, and more and more of the world’s information and knowledge morph into streams of 1s and 0s, the notion that computers prefer to “speak” in binary numbers is rarely questioned. According to new research from Columbia Engineering, this could be about to change.

In recent years, robots have gained artificial vision, touch, and even smell. “Researchers have been giving robots human-like perception,” says MIT Associate Professor Fadel Adib. In a new paper, Adib’s team is pushing the technology a step further. “We’re trying to give robots superhuman perception,” he says.

The key theme of SAS Open D[N]A Café on March 4 was symbiotic robotics, the interaction between humans and robots. The host of this café, Arthur de Crook, interviewed Jaimy Siebel and Joost van de Loo of RoboValley, the thriving robotics community driven by TU Delft Robotics Institute. RoboValley aims to stimulate the development of intelligent robotics by furthering collaboration between industry, government and academia. Here are some takeaways.

A team of researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has developed a new early warning system for vehicles that uses artificial intelligence to learn from thousands of real traffic situations. A study of the system was carried out in cooperation with the BMW Group. The results show that, if used in today’s self-driving vehicles, it can warn seven seconds in advance against potentially critical situations that the cars cannot handle alone – with over 85% accuracy.

Scientists at the University of Göttingen have now investigated how efficient the use of AI can be in the commercial management of trucks. Their answer: the best option is an intelligent combination of human decision-making and AI applications. The study was published in the International Journal of Logistics Management.

Hanson Robotics, the creator of  the much-hyped robot Sophia will work with Immervision’s JOYCE to further evolve machine perception to help deliver human-like vision.

Opération chirurgicale la plus fréquente dans le monde, la cataracte méritait bien un robot dédié. La startup Keranova devrait commercialiser ses premières unités d’ici la fin de l’année, pour ensuite s’attaquer à la myopie et à l’astigmatisme.

Terradepth today announced the successful completion of its Phase 1 trials with an autonomous submarine. The test was executed at Lake Travis in Travis County, Texas. The Phase 1 test results demonstrate that the company’s unmanned submersible could collect and process underwater data, understand features of import, and automatically retask itself with no human intervention.

Researchers have found that out of the more than 300 COVID-19 machine learning models described in scientific papers in 2020, none of them is suitable for detecting or diagnosing COVID-19 from standard medical imaging, due to biases, methodological flaws, lack of reproducibility, and ‘Frankenstein datasets.’

Robotics researchers are developing exoskeletons and prosthetic legs capable of thinking and making control decisions on their own using sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) technology.