Bots & Brains

Microsoft Germany has announced that GPT-4 will be released this week, according to the company’s CTO, Andreas Braun. The announcement was made during an event called “AI in Focus – Digital Kickoff” last week. The event focused on large language models (LLMs) like GPT, and their potential to disrupt companies, as well as Microsoft’s Azure-OpenAI offering.

European Robotics Forum 2023, which will take place next week in Odense, Denmark, is fast approaching a record number of 1,000 participants. As the ODEON venue is not big enough to host all the extra sessions next to the main event, the Concert Hall (Koncerthuset0 next door will be used as well.

 A University of Central Florida researcher has received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to enhance the current understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) reasoning.

A tiny robot that could one day help doctors perform surgery was inspired by the gripping ability of geckos and the efficient locomotion of inchworms. The robot, developed by engineers at the University of Waterloo, utilizes ultraviolet (UV) light and magnetic force to move on any surface, even up walls and across ceilings.

After competing in the finals with the University College London, which presented Bubble Worlds, a research team led by Dr. Sona Kwak from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology presented CollaBot and received the best award in the “hardware, design, and interface” category at the Robot Design Competition hosted by the International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR) 2022.

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev engineer Dr. David Zarrouk and his student Omer Guetta have developed AmphiSAW, one of the fastest and most efficient amphibious robots. Befitting the director and member of the Bioinspired and Medical Robotics Lab, the robot’s movement in water is inspired by the movement of flippers and its land movements are inspired by centipedes.

Ouster provider of digital lidar, and Velodyne, making lidar sensors, announced the completion of their merger. The combined company will keep the name Ouster and continue to trade on New York Stock Exchange. The merger creates a lidar provider with over 850 customers spanning the automotive, industrial, robotics, and smart infrastructure industries.

A team of researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology and TNO at Holst Centre have managed to make photodiodes – based on a similar technology – with a photoelectron yield of more than 200 percent. Efficiencies of more than 100 percent can be done because of quantum efficiency and stacked solar cells.

Walking robots, flying drones, protective exoskeletons and more were developed at UMass Lowell, which recently celebrated 10 years of robotics at the university’s New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center.

The rapid retreat of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica appears to be driven by different processes under its floating ice shelf than researchers previously understood. Novel observations from where the ice enters the ocean show that while melting beneath much of the ice shelf is weaker than expected, melting in cracks and crevasses is much faster.