All posts tagged: robotics

Nvidia and Alphabet’s Intrinsic aim to revolutionize next-gen robotics

Nvidia and Alphabet’s Intrinsic aim to revolutionize next-gen robotics

Discover how companies are responsibly integrating AI in production. This invite-only event in SF will explore the intersection of technology and business. Find out how you can attend here. Nvidia and Alphabet’s Intrinsic have teamed up to show off advancements in robotic grasping and industrial scalability. The companies said that the landscape of robotics will further change with the integration of new AI and platform technologies. At the Automate trade show in Chicago this week, Intrinsic is unveiling advances in robotic grasping and industrial scalability, powered by Nvidia’s Isaac Manipulator and AI capabilities. Isaac Manipulator, introduced by Nvidia at GTC 2024 in March, represents a milestone in industrial automation. It comprises foundation models and GPU-accelerated libraries designed to facilitate scalable and repeatable workflows for dynamic manipulation tasks. These foundation models, based on transformer deep learning architecture, enable robots to perceive and make decisions autonomously, akin to human-like understanding. The collaboration between Nvidia and Intrinsic demonstrates the potential for a universally applicable robotic-grasping skill to work seamlessly across various grippers, environments, and objects. Wendy Tan White, …

Roundtables: Inside the Next Era of AI and Hardware

Roundtables: Inside the Next Era of AI and Hardware

Recorded on April 30, 2024 Inside the Next Era of AI and Hardware Speakers: James O’Donnell, AI reporter, and Charlotte Jee, News editor Hear first-hand from our AI reporter, James O’Donnell, as he walks our news editor Charlotte Jee through the latest goings-on in his beat, from rapid advances in robotics to autonomous military drones, wearable devices, and tools for AI-powered surgeries. Related Coverage An OpenAI spinoff has built an AI model that helps robots learn tasks like humans Watch this robot as it learns to stitch up wounds A new satellite will use Google’s AI to map methane leaks from space Source link

The Download: robotics’ data bottleneck, and our AI afterlives

The Download: robotics’ data bottleneck, and our AI afterlives

Roboticists believe that, using new AI techniques, they can unlock more capable robots that can move freely through unfamiliar environments and tackle challenges they’ve never seen before. But something is standing in the way: lack of access to the types of data used to train robots so they can interact with the physical world. It’s far harder to come by than the data used to train the most advanced AI models, and that scarcity is one of the main things currently holding progress in robotics back. As a result, leading companies and labs are in fierce competition to find new and better ways to gather the data they need. It’s led them down strange paths, like using robotic arms to flip pancakes for hours on end. And they’re running into the same sorts of privacy, ethics, and copyright issues as their counterparts in the world of AI. Read the full story. —James O’Donnell My deepfake shows how valuable our data is in the age of AI —Melissa Heikkilä Deepfakes are getting good. Like, really good. …

Robotics could be used to diagnose and remove lung cancer in patients in one sitting, medics says | UK News

Robotics could be used to diagnose and remove lung cancer in patients in one sitting, medics says | UK News

Robotics could be used to diagnose and remove lung cancer in one sitting in a move that would be “transformational” for patients and NHS waiting lists, according to medics trialling the technology. Professor Pallav Shah, a consultant respiratory physician based at Royal Brompton Hospital in London, said his team is “generally getting good results” after testing the procedure on seven patients. One of them was a woman who was unable to have more radiotherapy as part of her treatment. The method using robotics allows doctors to target and remove nodules on the lung with millimetre precision. Before the procedure, a CT scan is performed and passed through software to create a detailed 3D roadmap of the inside of the patient’s lungs from the mouth to the location of the cancer. A thin, robot-guided tube, or catheter, is then passed through the patient’s mouth and into the airways. Once located, cancer cells are destroyed using heat in a process known as microwave ablation. Professor Shah said: “We can get to the nodule really precisely. “The first …

Somehow This ,000 Flame-Thrower Robot Dog Is Completely Legal in 48 States

Somehow This $10,000 Flame-Thrower Robot Dog Is Completely Legal in 48 States

If you’ve been wondering when you’ll be able to order the flame-throwing robot that Ohio-based Throwflame first announced last summer, that day has finally arrived. The Thermonator, what Throwflame bills as “the first-ever flamethrower-wielding robot dog” is now available for purchase. The price? $9,420. Thermonator is a quadruped robot with an ARC flamethrower mounted to its back, fueled by gasoline or napalm. It features a one-hour battery, a 30-foot flame-throwing range, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity for remote control through a smartphone. It also includes a LIDAR sensor for mapping and obstacle avoidance, laser sighting, and first-person view (FPV) navigation through an onboard camera. The product appears to integrate a version of the Unitree Go2 robot quadruped that retails alone for $1,600 in its base configuration. Photograph: Xmatter The company lists possible applications of the new robot as “wildfire control and prevention,” “agricultural management,” “ecological conservation,” “snow and ice removal,” and “entertainment and SFX.” But most of all, it sets things on fire in a variety of real-world scenarios. Back in 2018, Elon Musk made …

Will Amazon’s robotic revolution spark a new wave of job losses?

Will Amazon’s robotic revolution spark a new wave of job losses?

Inside Amazon’s Operations Innovation Lab in Vercelli, Italy Sam Todd/Amazon The world’s largest manufacturer of robots is a company you have probably heard of. As of last year, Amazon had installed more than 750,000 robots in its warehouses, and it is investing hundreds of millions of pounds on developing and building more. Many of these robots perform tasks that were once carried out by people, such as packing, sorting and labelling. Are we seeing the beginning of a new wave of automation replacing human workers across many industries? To find… Source link

Tesla layoffs, Cybertruck recalls and Serve Robotics goes public

Tesla layoffs, Cybertruck recalls and Serve Robotics goes public

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Tesla is back in the news cycle and our crystal ball says it’s one of those long-term affairs. The week kicked off with layoffs — about 10% of its more than 140,000-person workforce — and CEO Elon Musk declaring he was going “balls to the wall” on autonomy. It ended with a Cybertruck recall. Cool cool. There’s lots more in the newsletter than just Tesla — although before we move on, do check out Sean O’Kane’s scoop about the company’s 1,800-mile Tesla Semi charging corridor program. Read on to catch up on Serve Robotics’ public market debut, a week of highs and lows for Waymo, and more. Let’s go!  A little bird While much of our focus is on startups and Silicon Valley, we do have some little birds in Washington, D.C. A little bird told us recently that federal …

Robots can make jobs less meaningful for human colleagues

Robots can make jobs less meaningful for human colleagues

Much has been (and will continue to be) written about automation’s impact on the jobs market. In the short-term, many employers have complained of an inability to fill roles and retain workers, further accelerating robotic adoption. The long-term impact these sorts of sweeping changes will have on the job market going forward remains to be seen. One aspect of the conversation that is oft neglected, however, is how human workers feel about their robotic colleagues. There’s a lot to be said for systems that augment or remove the more backbreaking aspects of blue-collar work. But could the technology also have a negative impact on worker morale? Both things can certainly be true at once. The Brookings Institution this week issued results gleaned from several surveys conducted over the past decade and a half to evaluate the impact that robotics has on job “meaningfulness.” The think tank defines the admittedly abstract notion thus: In exploring what makes work meaningful, we rely on self-determination theory. According to this theory, satisfying three innate psychological needs — competence, autonomy, …

Uber, Nvidia-backed Serve Robotics hits public markets with M splash

Uber, Nvidia-backed Serve Robotics hits public markets with $40M splash

Serve Robotics, the Uber and Nvidia-backed sidewalk robot delivery company, debuted publicly on the New York stock exchange Thursday, making it the latest startup to choose going public via a reverse merger as an alternative path to capital needed to fund growth. The company, which spun out of Uber’s acquisition of Postmates in 2021, hits the Nasdaq under the ticker “SERV” with gross proceeds of roughly $40 million — “prior to deducting underwriting discounts and offering expenses,” per regulatory filings — at a share price of $4. Serve completed its reverse merger with blank-check company Patricia Acquisition Corp in August 2023, and at the same time secured $30 million in a round led by existing investors Uber, Nvidia and Wavemaker Partners, bringing its total amount raised at the time to $56 million. While Serve’s debut in the public markets comes from a reverse merger and not a SPAC, the two alternate paths to IPO are not too dissimilar. They both provide startups with a faster route to public markets. However, pulling this particular financial lever …