Lifeboat Foundation

For years, Boston Dynamics’ only commercial product has been vaguely unsettling videos of robots moving in realistic ways. That changes today. No, the robots aren’t getting less creepy. Boston Dynamics has a real commercial product: Spot. This quadrupedal robot is shipping out to select companies, but it could expand to general sales eventually.

We’ve seen Spot (originally known as SpotMini) show up in various video demonstrations. You’ve seen it twerk, and now you might see it work. Boston Dynamics isn’t entirely certain what sort of work Spot will do, but that’s why it’s starting with a limited sales program. It wants to work closely with early adopters to evaluate Spot’s usefulness in the real world.

Continue reading “Boston Dynamics Begins Selling ‘Spot’ Robot” »

PricewaterhouseCoopers, the large accounting and management consulting firm, released a startling report indicating that workers will be highly impacted by the fast-growing rise of artificial intelligence, robots and related technologies.

Banking and financial services employees, factory workers and office staff will seemingly face the loss of their jobs—or need to find a way to reinvent themselves in this brave new world.

The term “artificial intelligence” is loosely used to describe the ability of a machine to mimic human behavior. AI includes well-known applications, such as Siri, GPS, Spotify, self-driving vehicles and the larger-than-life robots made by Boston Robotics that perform incredible feats.

For better and worse, toys powered by AI are becoming an intimate part of kids’ lives.

Researchers at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) in Russia have recently introduced a new strategy to enhance interactions between humans and robotic swarms, called SwarmTouch. This strategy, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, allows a human operator to communicate with a swarm of nano-quadrotor drones and guide their formation, while receiving tactile feedback in the form of vibrations.

“We are working in the field of swarm of drones and my previous research in the field of haptics was very helpful in introducing a new frontier of tactile human-swarm interactions,” Dzmitry Tsetserukou, Professor at Skoltech and head of Intelligent Space Robotics laboratory, told TechXplore. “During our experiments with the swarm, however, we understood that current interfaces are too unfriendly and difficult to operate.”

Continue reading “SwarmTouch: A tactile interaction strategy for human-swarm communication” »

Fintech risk management systems are getting a makeover. By adding machine learning technologies to their traditional rules-based fraud management systems, banks hope that they can do better at catching real criminals while declining fewer legitimate credit card transactions. ML technologies, though, have their own gotchas.

Here and there, although not necessarily everywhere, banks are introducing machine language technologies into their fraud detection systems. Essentially, the objective is twofold: to detect real incidents of fraud quickly and accurately, and to do so while preventing false positives, in which legitimate transactions are wrongly tagged as suspicious.

Large banks have led the way in spending on ML-enabled risk management, says Steven D’Alfonso, a research director at IDC responsible for compliance, fraud, and risk analytics strategies for IDC Financial Insights. Lots of bigger banks plan to expand the artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled fraud detection systems into enterprise-wide decision support systems. Many smaller banks that haven’t yet embarked on ML are expected to follow by signing on for ML managed services.

We hear it daily — “Launch your drone program!” Uninspired marketing campaigns littered across social media, websites and emails. A detrimental circle of brands mirroring brands, unwittingly stalling the rise of drones. The problem is, as an industry, they’re missing the damn point. Take for example a use case we see all too often — construction. When handheld drills started showing up on jobsites, we didn’t hear Black + Decker say, “launch your drill program!” Why not? Drills are just enablers. They allow workers to do what they were already doing — except better, faster and more efficiently. The breakthrough had little to do with the actual tool itself, and more the new ability to enable faster holes. Drones are no different.

The goal isn’t to “put a drone on every construction site.” Drones are promising new vehicles that have the potential to transform industry, but they also inherently introduce new costs and complexities. The thought of adding new tools, new responsibilities, new certifications and permits, and new burdens to an already complex operation is the exact opposite of what most project managers consider helpful. This might begin to explain why drone service providers today are collectively struggling to grow at any meaningful velocity. We’re creating “launch your drone programs” solutions that make it easier for businesses to own and operate drones, when we should be making the drone invisible, and become laser-focused on the data drones generate and an infrastructure that supports rapid spatial insights.

We need to stop putting drones on construction sites, and start giving the industry the very thing that drones enable — insight. Drones will be on every job site in the next few years, but not as another tool on the tool belt. The project manager isn’t adopting a drone program. They’re adopting a visual insights program that captures a new, historical perspective across their sites. They’re providing situational awareness holistically throughout their organization. They’re making decisions based on the actual state of projects, and the insights affordable by new perspectives and sensors.

A robotic Japanese cargo ship successfully arrived at the International Space Station Saturday (Sept. 28) carrying more than 4 tons of supplies, including new batteries for the outpost’s solar power grid.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) HTV-8 cargo ship pulled up to the space station at 7:12 a.m. EDT (1112 GMT), where it was captured by a robotic arm wielded by NASA astronaut Christina Koch inside the orbiting lab. The station and HTV-8, also known as Kounotori 8 (Kounotori means “white stork” in Japanese), were soaring 262 miles (422 kilometers) over Angola in southern Africa at the time.

“What you all have done is a testament to what we can accomplish when international teams work together towards a common goal,” Koch radioed to NASA’s Mission Control in Houston and flight controllers at JAXA’s Tsukuba Space Center in Japan. “We’re honored to have Kounotori on board, and look forward to a successful and productive mission together.”

DARPA is asking for help to create the super-fast network interface card that industry has so far failed to produce.

Finally, the future that children of the ’80s want to see is on its way. NASA is working on its very own Transformer — a bot called Shapeshifter, made up of smaller robots which can combine into different configurations to roll, swim, fly, and float.

Shapeshifter is a prototype for exploring Saturn’s moon Titan. Before it ended its mission by burning up in Saturn’s rings, the Cassini probe flew by Titan more than one hundred times, observing the moon which is surprisingly similar to Earth. It has rivers, lakes, and rain, but instead of being made of water, these bodies are made of liquid methane and ethane. On Earth, these are gases, but in the freezing temperatures of Titan, they are liquid. Cassini collected mapping data of the surface, and scientists have been keen to discover more since then.

Continue reading “Autobots, Roll Out: NASA Creates Transforming Robot for Exploring Titan” »