AI & Robotics News and Discussions

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

DALL-E 2 is here
OpenAI's DALL·E 2

[caltrek]

Scientists Develop AI Camera To Take Full-Color Photos In Complete Darkness
by Dr Katie Spalding
April 7, 2022

https://www.iflscience.com/technology/s ... -darkness/

Introduction:

(IFL Science) Humans are, let’s face it, kind of the dunces of the animal kingdom. We can’t sniff stuff as well as dogs or bees; we can’t hear as well as bats; even our primary sense, sight, pales in comparison to animals that can see ultraviolet or infrared. In fact, the only advantage we have really isn’t a sense at all, but our big old brains.

Sometimes, though, that’s all you need as a species. We can’t see in the dark, but we can invent infrared cameras to do it for us – and now, researchers from the University of California, Irvine, have developed a way to make those images even closer to the real thing.

“Some night vision systems use infrared light that is not perceptible to humans and the images rendered are transposed to a digital display presenting a monochromatic image in the visible spectrum,” explains a paper describing the technology, published this week in the journal PLOS ONE.

“We sought to develop an imaging algorithm powered by optimized deep learning architectures whereby infrared spectral illumination of a scene could be used to predict a visible spectrum rendering of the scene as if it were perceived by a human with visible spectrum light,” the paper continues. “This would make it possible to digitally render a visible spectrum scene to humans when they are otherwise in complete ‘darkness’ and only illuminated with infrared light.”

So: a camera that can reconstruct color images from infrared light? Well, actually, no – not quite. The important bit isn’t the camera, but the algorithm the team used to reconstruct the images. They created a special type of AI known as a neural network – a kind of deep learning algorithm designed to simulate how human brains learn – which they then trained to spot correlations between how images look under infrared and under the visible spectrum.

[weatheriscool]

A robot that can put a surgical gown on a supine mannequin
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-04-rob ... equin.html
by Bob Yirka , Tech Xplore

A pair of researchers working in the Personal Robotics Laboratory at Imperial College London has taught a robot to put a surgical gown on a supine mannequin. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, Fan Zhang and Yiannis Demiris described the approach they used to teach the robot to partially dress the mannequin. Júlia Borràs, with Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, CSIC-UPC, has published a Focus piece in the same journal issue outlining the difficulties in getting robots to handle soft material and the work done by the researchers on this new effort.

As researchers and engineers continue to improve the state of robotics, one area has garnered a lot of attention—using robots to assist with health care. In this instance, the focus was on assisting patients in a hospital setting who have lost the use of their limbs. In such cases, dressing and undressing falls to healthcare workers. Teaching a robot to dress patients has proven to be challenging due to the nature of the soft materials used to make clothes. They change in a near infinite number of ways, making it difficult to teach a robot how to deal with them. To overcome this problem in a clearly defined setting, Zhang and Demiris used a new approach.

[Yuli Ban]

We've got yet ANOTHER AI breakthrough


This week has been outrageous, historic even

[Yuli Ban]

Elon Musk gave a timeline to production for the first time for the Tesla Optimus project, a humanoid robot capable of doing general tasks.

The CEO believes the company can bring the ambitious project to production as soon as next year. It’s an ultra-ambitious timeline even for him.

When Tesla announced the “Tesla Bot” project at its A Day last year, Elon Musk presented it as something the company could do by leveraging existing work and parts from the development of self-driving technology, and if they don’t do it, someone else will.

At the time, it certainly didn’t sound like a priority for Tesla and many saw it mainly as a recruitment tool as the automaker is trying to boost its AI team to deliver its full self-driving system.

A few months later, the project’s priority level went up fast.

Musk announced that Tesla is now prioritizing product development of Tesla Bot, which he now calls Optimus, in 2022 over some of its upcoming vehicles.

The CEO appeared a lot more excited about the project and its potential to impact labor shortage and eventually the broader economy.

When first announcing the project, Tesla was aiming to have a prototype of the humanoid robot ready by the end of 2022, but there was no talk of a production timeline just yet.

[Yuli Ban]

[raklian]

So Ukraine has some pretty smart people, eh? See the Ukrainian flag on top of a building behind the dude explaining what he thought about PaLM at the beginning.

[Yuli Ban]