Lifeboat Foundation

Swiss-based scientists have developed a robot double act in which a hexacopter helps a dog-like, land-based robot find its way around obstacles. The technology could be deployed in space exploration or warfare.

“Flying and walking robots can use their complementary features in terms of viewpoint and payload capability to the best in a heterogeneous team,” says an intro to a video posted on YouTube by the team at ETH Zurich, Switzerland’s leading tech research institution.

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They’ll be back.

Experts have previously voiced their fears of malevolent Terminator -style artificial intelligence developing sufficient smarts to pose a risk to humans in the future, but the very real dangers of robotic warfare are already becoming a problem.

Despite the best efforts of a huge coalition of scientists and tech leaders calling for a ban on the development of autonomous weapons systems, the failure of the United Nations to effectively regulate the ‘killer robot’ industry is already enabling the makers of dangerous technology, according to a report in The Guardian.

Continue reading “Risk of robotic warfare edges closer as UN regulation stalls, experts warn” »

1. A heart of foam.
2. Artificial arteries.
3. Brain implants.
4. Robotic hand that can recognize objects by Feel.
5. Upside-Down Rover to explore Europa.

Welcome to #18 Avatar Technology Digest. Again, get ready for exciting news on Technology, Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence. Thank you for watching us. You are welcome to Subscribe, follow us in social media, leave your comments and join the conversation. And here are the top stories of the last week.

1) A heart of foam could replace your own. Existing artificial hearts have multiple moving parts, which increases the chance of failure, but this new device is just a single piece of material. Researchers inspired by soft robots have built a pumping artificial heart that could one day replace the real deal.
The team of Bioengineers at Cornell University build their robots out of a solid, plastic foam, which naturally has an interconnected network of tubes to let air flow – just as our muscles are permeated by blood vessels. A solid coating of plastic seals everything inside like a skin.

Continue reading “#18 Avatar Technology Digest / Paralyzed Patients Control Comp…” »

Leave a human baby with some toys and it’ll quickly learn to pick them up. Now a robot with deep learning capabilities has done the same thing.

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More details on Honda’s secretive humanoid project.

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Some people might find it enough reason to worry; others, enough reason to be upbeat about what we can achieve in computer science; all await the next chapters in artificial intelligence to see what more a machine can do to mimic human intelligence. We already saw what machines can do in arithmetic, chess and pattern recognition.

MIT Technology Review poses the bigger question: to what extent do these capabilities add up to the equivalent of human intelligence? Shedding some light on AI and humans, a team went ahead to subject an AI system to a standard IQ test given to humans.

Their paper describing their findings has been posted on arXiv. The team is from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an AI research group in Hungary. The AI system which they used is ConceptNet, an open-source project run by the MIT Common Sense Computing Initiative.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29xnzxgCx6I/PLx1XbvvfIlc529HjUBHFmOAowGqoWnrdh

Well, this is it. The day all my dreams came true. I started out playing 2D side-scrollers in mall arcades in the 1980s, but I’ll soon be able to fight holographic robots bursting through my living room walls using my handheld blaster that’s a wearable hologram. WTF.

Today at Microsoft’s October 2015 event in New York, the team kicked off their new products announcement with a live HoloLens demonstration that pitted one headset-wearing Microsoft employee against arachnid alien bots crawling through a living room situation in what the company is calling “mixed reality gaming.” The demoed gameplay, codenamed Project X, allows you to defend any room in your home (or any other building) against encroaching alien invasion.

Continue reading “Project X Lets You Fight HoloLens Aliens In Your Living Room, And It’s Freaking Unreal” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=C3rNIxMlKmI

Microsoft took time during today’s Windows 10 Devices event to give the audience a more in-depth look at what its new HoloLens AR system is capable of. Minds were blown, jaws were dropped and more than a few digital robots were blown to smithereens during the 8-minute demo.

The game is called Project X-Ray. Microsoft developed it in-house as an experiment in “mixed-reality entertainment” and involves using the HoloLens controller as a ray gun to blast digital enemies which emerge from the room’s walls. Running around your living room while wearing a $3,000 headset (what Microsoft is reportedly planning to charge developers) probably isn’t the safest of indoor activities, but dang this game looks insanely fun regardless.

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A self-driving lorry takes to Germany’s motorways.
Would you feel safe driving next to one?

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