Bots in Society

Since July 2020, the 200 skips that collect Toulouse inhabitants’ waste from the 13 waste disposal centers managed by SUEZ have been equipped with embedded artificial intelligence. Under test since 2019, the ffly4u solution has been deployed with the objectives of reducing fuel consumption, optimizing skip flows and reducing costs by optimizing collection resources.

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.

Blue Ocean Robotics, the manufacturer of the autonomous disinfecting robot UVD Robots equipped with UV-C light, has been selected by Gallup McKinley County Schools (GMCS) in New Mexico to supply 37 UVD Robots to the districts’ schools to help fight the Coronavirus and other infectious diseases.

According to the latest Canalys research, 3.5 million passenger cars worldwide were sold with level 2* autonomy driving features in Q4 2020, growing 91% year-on-year. Level 2 autonomy driving features were in 30% of new vehicles sold in the US, 20% in Japan, 19% in Europe and 12% in China. For the full-year 2020 11.2 million cars sold with level 2 features, a growth of 78% compared to 2019.

Artificial intelligence-driven robots are deployed in all echelons of companies to perform repetitive tasks. But…

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.