Bots & Brains

The University of Liverpool’s Digital Innovation Facility (DIF), a £12.7 million Centre of Excellence in emerging digital technologies, has officially opened. The 1500 M2 facility includes state of the art laboratories featuring cutting edge equipment and highly skilled support to facilitate enhanced access for businesses and organisations that wish to collaborate with University experts across multiple technology areas including virtual reality, robotics, artificial intelligence, data science, simulation and data modelling.

Immervision, developer of vision systems combining optics, image processing, and sensor fusion technology, will be used by Halodi Robotics to provide their next generation vision system for their humanoid service robot platform, capable of handling both human and computer vision.

Levatas, developers of AI software for robots and drones at industrial sites, announced that it has raised $5.5 million in a seed round led by Castellan Group. Levatas was founded by CEO Chris Nielsen, along with partners Ryan Gay and Daniel Bruce, who serve as Chief Financial Officer and Chief Product Officer, respectively.

Researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) developed a new approach to model the dynamics of underwater stingray-like robots using Machine Learning. This approach can enable more efficient swimming in complex underwater environments by accurately predicting required flapping motions for a set of given propulsive force targets.

192.2 mph/309.3 kph. Never before has a car driven by artificial intelligence alone been this fast. Last week on the straight of the Space Shuttle airstrip at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, the car created by the Politecnico di Milano-PoliMOVE broke the world speed record for a fully autonomous car on a straight.

The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) today announced six winners of the 2022 Engelberger Robotics Awards, the world’s most prestigious robotics honor. At a special dinner in conjunction with the Automate 2022 Show and Conference in Detroit on June 8, Michael P. Jacobs of Applied Manufacturing Technologies (AMT) will be honored for his leadership in automation while Oussama Khatib of Stanford University will be awarded for education and Marc Raibert of Boston Dynamics for technology.

GIST researchers have developed a way for robot vision to identify occluded objects. Much like human vision, the method allows for the detection of visible, partially occluded, and unseen objects in a single framework.

Recently, a team led by Prof. Qing Shi from Beijing Institute of Technology, China, has developed a novel robotic rat named SQuRo (small-sized quadruped robotic rat), which was made available online  in the journal IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

BrainChip, producer of neuromorphic AI IP and chips, and nViso, a human behavioral analytics AI company, announced a collaboration targeting battery-powered applications in robotics and mobility/automotive to address the need for high levels of AI performance with ultra-low power technologies.

In an era of social distancing and quarantine, Ben-Gurion University researchers suggest a mixed methods strategy for remote cognitive training via virtual reality and interactive robot.