AI & Robotics News and Discussions

[caltrek]

Coming Soon: A Programmable Army of Humanoid Robots
by Jennifer Kingson
March 14, 2024

Introduction:

(Axios) Envisioning a day when hundreds of humanoid robots can be summoned and deployed at the touch of a button, Agility Robotics has announced its first fleet management platform.

Why it matters: There's intense competition among humanoid robot manufacturers to get their products into the industrial marketplace, where companies like Amazon and BMW are eager for their help.

Driving the news: The new platform, Agility Arc, is a cloud-based tool that'll be able to command a robot army, say, to start moving bins to a conveyor belt at a particular time.

What they're saying: "The ability to control fleets of robots is something that everybody in the robotics business needs to do," Damion Shelton, president of Agility Robotics, tells Axios.

• "I think we're the first humanoid robot vendor to have any solution offering on that front."
• Agility "envisions ultimately very large deployments, into the hundreds," Shelton adds.

Read more here: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/14/human ... arehouse

[firestar464]

I feel somewhat disappointed after Jimmy Apples promised "a big week for AI" when Claude 3 was released. It ended up just being "omg claude is so cool." Ah well.

[weatheriscool]

A system that allows home robots to cook in collaboration with humans
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-03-hom ... umans.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

Home robots could assist humans with the completion of various chores and manual tasks, ranging from washing dishes or doing the laundry to cooking, cleaning and tidying up. While many roboticists and computer scientists have tried to improve the skills of home robots in recent years, many of the robots developed so far are still unable to tackle more complex and creative tasks, such as cooking in collaboration with human users.

Researchers at Cornell University have recently developed MOSAIC, a modular architecture that allows robots to perform complex household tasks that involve closely interacting with humans, including interactive cooking. This system, introduced in a paper published on the arXiv preprint server, was tested in a series of real-world experiments, showing that it could support humans with cooking various recipes.

"We present MOSAIC, a modular architecture for home robots to perform complex collaborative tasks, such as cooking with everyday users," Huaxiaoyue Wang, Kushal Kedia and their colleagues wrote in their paper. "MOSAIC tightly collaborates with humans, interacts with users using natural language, coordinates multiple robots, and manages an open vocabulary of everyday objects."

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

Apple’s New AI Move Just Changed The Game For All iPhone Users

Mar 15, 2024,01:14pm EDT

Apple has just ramped up its AI plans after buying Canadian startup DarwinAI. It comes just months before the release of the iPhone maker’s iOS 18 software and as Apple makes its first major push into generative AI this year.

Apple bought DarwinAI earlier this year, and the firm’s employees have joined the iPhone maker’s AI division, according to Bloomberg, which cites “people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the deal hasn’t been announced.”

Ahead of the iOS 18 launch, which is already earmarked for a number of cool, AI enabled features, Bloomberg describes how DarwinAI makes technology that can “inspect components during the manufacturing process.”

Another advantage of DarwinAI that will benefit Apple specifically is the company has developed tech that can make AI systems smaller and faster. “That could be helpful to Apple, which is focused on running AI on devices rather than entirely in the cloud,” Bloomberg writes.

[...]

It’s certainly a major move for Apple, and the purchase of DarwinAI could give it the credentials to properly compete in the AI space against rivals such as Google and Microsoft. It also explains the big plans for iOS 18 that we have seen talked about in 2024.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahe ... 121dc7277a

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Apollo humanoid lends a helping hand on the Mercedes production line
By Paul Ridden
March 18, 2024
https://newatlas.com/robotics/apptronik ... des-pilot/

Humanoid robots are entering the workforce. Following in the footsteps of Figure 01 at BMW and Digit in Amazon's R&D facility, Apptronik's Apollo bot is helping skilled human workers build cars for Mercedes-Benz.

According to Goldman Sachs, the global humanoid industrial robot market could reach US$38 billion by 2035, with analysts noting that "humanoids are particularly appealing for tasks that are 'dangerous, dirty and dull.'" The team also suggests that customers could even pay a premium for robots that can undertake dangerous tasks that humans are not so keen on, such as nuclear reactor maintenance.

But such perils are unlikely to greet Apollo during the Mercedes pilot announced on Friday, where the auto maker is looking to relieve its workers of humdrum tedium, repetitive tasks and physically demanding workloads.

[weatheriscool]

NVIDIA aims to speed up humanoid development with Project GR00T
By Paul Ridden
March 20, 2024

NVIDIA has announced that it's building a new AI platform for just about all of the big players in humanoid robot development, which is based on a general-purpose foundation model that's possibly named after a talking tree-like creature from the Marvel Universe.

The Generalist Robot 00 Technology project – or GR00T for short – is described as "a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots, designed to further its [NVIDIA's] work driving breakthroughs in robotics and embodied AI."

As you might expect for a first introduction, low-level details are somewhat lacking. It's being designed so that bots will be able to understand natural language, for the next stage of the kind of interaction with humans that was recently demonstrated to great effect by Figure's GPT-enhanced 01 humanoid.

https://newatlas.com/robotics/nvidia-hu ... ect-gr00t/

[Tadasuke]

In my opinion, AI and robots could and should help us with reducing chaos, increasing order and improving well-being on Earth (and no, escaping to Mars is not an option).

However, nearly every day I hear people complaining about being overworked, about high prices, about crappy software (including video games) and about health problems. Everything that AI and robots were supposed to help us with. I guess it's still in the future.

I do see the amount of chaos and the amount of complaining (yes, I'm also adding to the complaining, I know) on the World Wide Web increasing, instead of decreasing. It is depressing. Wtf are we doing?

The collective is the sum of all individual decisions. Would be nice, if people somehow managed to be more mindful, careful and conscientious.

[Time_Traveller]

AI could predict patients' future health conditions, study finds

Thursday 21 March 2024 05:40, UK



Artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to predict the type of health conditions a patient is likely to develop in the future, a study has found.

The technology could be used to help doctors when it comes to monitoring patients or making decisions around diagnosis, researchers said.

The AI tool, known as Foresight, belongs to the same family of AI models as ChatGPT but has been trained using information from NHS electronic records.

It was developed by researchers from King's College London (KCL), University College London (UCL), King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust.

The researchers trained three different models of Foresight using data from more than 811,000 patients from two NHS trusts in London and a publicly available dataset in the US.

https://news.sky.com/story/ai-could-pre ... s-13098978