March 8, 2023

Ars Technica: Google’s PaLM-E is a generalist robot brain that takes commands

Ars Technica: Google’s PaLM-E is a generalist robot brain that takes commands. “On Monday, a group of AI researchers from Google and the Technical University of Berlin unveiled PaLM-E, a multimodal embodied visual-language model (VLM) with 562 billion parameters that integrates vision and language for robotic control. They claim it is the largest VLM ever developed and that it can perform a variety of tasks without the need for retraining.”

Research & Opinion 0
January 11, 2023

Ars Technica: Chuck E. Cheese still uses floppy disks in 2023, but not for long

Ars Technica: Chuck E. Cheese still uses floppy disks in 2023, but not for long. “On Sunday, a Chuck E. Cheese employee named Stewart Coonrod posted a TikTok video that documents the process of installing a new song-and-dance show on an old Chuck E. Cheese animatronics system—a process that involves a 3.5-inch floppy disk and two DVDs. Coonrod says it is the last update before his store undergoes a remodel that will remove the animatronics altogether.”

Other Things I Think Are Cool 0
January 8, 2023

New York Times: ‘Consciousness’ in Robots Was Once Taboo. Now It’s the Last Word.

New York Times: ‘Consciousness’ in Robots Was Once Taboo. Now It’s the Last Word.. “Wading directly into these murky waters might seem fruitless to roboticists and computer scientists. But, as Antonio Chella, a roboticist at the University of Palermo in Italy, said, unless consciousness is accounted for, ‘it feels like something is missing’ in the function of intelligent machines.”

Research & Opinion 0
January 3, 2023

Hackaday: Wearable Skobots Full Of Steam And Vanishing Indigenous Languages

Hackaday: Wearable Skobots Full Of Steam And Vanishing Indigenous Languages. “[Danielle Boyer] is Ojibwe: Sault Ste Marie Tribe and passionate about preserving vanishing indigenous languages. She’s invented a shoulder-worn talking companion, called a SkoBot, to teach STEAM to children through building robots programmed with indigenous language lessons and founded the STEAM Connection to give them away.”

Other Things I Think Are Cool 0
October 22, 2022

Robo-Kono: Researchers unveil robotic avatar of Japan’s digital minister (The Mainichi)

The Mainichi: Robo-Kono: Researchers unveil robotic avatar of Japan’s digital minister . “Some politicians get criticized for being robotic, but this is taking things to extremes. A group of robotics researchers unveiled a mechanical ‘avatar’ of Minister for Digital Reform Taro Kono to the press on Oct. 21, apparently the first example in the world of a robot doppelganger of a serving government minister.”

Research & Opinion 0
October 20, 2022

Popular Science: Why Google taught robots to play ping pong

Popular Science: Why Google taught robots to play ping pong. “Yesterday, Google Research unveiled two new projects it’s been working on with a table tennis-playing robot. The Robotics team at Google taught a robot arm to play 300+ shot rallies with other people and return serves with the precision of ‘amateur humans.’ While this might not sound that impressive given how bad some people are at table tennis, the same techniques could be used to train robots to perform other ‘dynamic, high acceleration tasks’ that require close human-robot interaction.”

Research & Opinion 0
August 19, 2022

Robocrops: Data science, technology and A.I. coalesce in the field of plant robotics (University of Georgia)

University of Georgia: Robocrops: Data science, technology and A.I. coalesce in the field of plant robotics. “A four-wheeled, phenotyping robot that operates autonomously or under human control, Watson is taking shape in Changying ‘Charlie’ Li’s lab at the Phenomics and Plant Robotics Center (PPRC) on the University of Georgia’s Athens campus in collaboration with researchers in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.”

Research & Opinion 0
July 10, 2022

New York Times: The Robot Guerrilla Campaign to Recreate the Elgin Marbles

New York Times: The Robot Guerrilla Campaign to Recreate the Elgin Marbles. “Few cultural disputes inflame British passions more than the disposition of the Parthenon Marbles. Public debate about the statuary has raged since the early 1800s, when the sculptures and bas-reliefs, which date from 447 B.C. to 432 B.C., were stripped from the Parthenon and other Classical Greek temples on the Acropolis of Athens by agents of Thomas Bruce, a Scottish statesman and seventh earl of Elgin…. Roger Michel, executive director of the Institute of Digital Archaeology, believes the long-running dust-up can be resolved with the help of 3-D machining.”

Research & Opinion 0
June 20, 2022

Scanned Objects by Google Research: A Dataset of 3D-Scanned Common Household Items (Google AI Blog)

Google AI Blog: Scanned Objects by Google Research: A Dataset of 3D-Scanned Common Household Items. “Historically, deep learning for computer vision has relied on datasets with millions of items that were gathered by web scraping, examples of which include ImageNet, Open Images, YouTube-8M, and COCO. However, the process of creating these datasets can be labor-intensive, and can still exhibit labeling errors that can distort the perception of progress. Furthermore, this strategy does not readily generalize to arbitrary three-dimensional shapes or real-world robotic data.”

Research & Opinion 0
April 28, 2022

NewScientist: Journey through the huge archive keeping the nation’s newspapers safe

NewScientist: Journey through the huge archive keeping the nation’s newspapers safe. “The British Library’s National Newspaper Building in Boston Spa holds millions of pages from newspapers spanning centuries. New Scientist got a rare chance to go inside the void to see the robot cranes in action and find out about the measures in place to protect the history within.” Just-over-three-minute video. Captions are auto-generated but good.

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
April 19, 2022

CNET: Meet Nikola, the Android Head Learning to Express Emotion

CNET: Meet Nikola, the Android Head Learning to Express Emotion. “Emotional expression has long been one of the things that separates man from machine, but a new android head named Nikola aims to change that. Nikola is part of the Guardian Robot Project, which aims to ‘incorporate psychology, brain science, cognitive science and AI research toward a future society where humans, AI and robots can flexibly coexist.’ The research is backed by RIKEN, a Japanese-government funded research institute.”

Research & Opinion 0

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