AI & Robotics News and Discussions

[weatheriscool]

[caltrek]

How to Build Better Extraterrestrial Robots
September 26, 2023

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) Running on the beach versus a paved road can change an athlete’s stride, speed and stability. Alter the force of gravity, and that runner may break their personal record or sink into the ground. Researchers have to consider such parameters when designing extraterrestrial rovers and landers — which can trawl where no person has stepped foot. To better inform this work, a multi-institutional team analyzed the flow of simulated regolith, a type of fragmental debris that covers the moon and rocky planets, using an artificial gravity generator on the International Space Station.
They published their work on Aug. 8 in npj Microgravity, a Nature journal.

“Studying the flow characteristics of regolith covering extra-terrestrial bodies under low gravity condition is essential for the reliable design and analysis of landers and rovers for space exploration,” said corresponding author Shingo Ozaki, professor at Yokohama National University. “Regolith, which is a potentially fluffy and powdery granular material, is a primary concern for the lander or rover; landing on such loose soil is a critical phase during exploration as the footpad of the landing gear may bury into the regolith.”

Spirit, one of the twin rovers that landed on Mars in 2004, fell victim to regolith six years into its mission. Its wheel became irrevocably stuck in regolith, forcing its termination.

“This issue clarified the importance of wheel-soil interaction mechanics,” Ozaki said. “These mechanical interaction models of machines — such as the landing gear or mobility system — on such granular media under various levels of gravitational acceleration are key to their reliable design and analysis.”

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1002721

[weatheriscool]

Amazon will use real user conversations to train Alexa's AI model
Source: NBC

Amazon announced new AI capabilities for its Alexa products last week, based on a model it’s calling AlexaLLM (LLM refers to the “large language model”). The technology will make Alexa “more personalized to your family” and allow it to remember relevant context throughout conversations like a human, Amazon said.

But along with those new capabilities, said Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services, Dave Limp, Amazon would use some user voice interactions with Alexa to train its AI model.

-snip-

In response to a viewer question in a Bloomberg TV interview, Limp said that by agreeing to use a more “customized” version of Alexa, users would be volunteering their voice data and conversations for Amazon’s LLM training purposes.

-snip-

Echo devices are activated after they detect certain keywords, such as “Alexa,” “Echo” or “Computer.” With AlexaLLM, though, the new "Alexa, let's chat" function can be enabled with Visual ID, which allows users to activate Alexa not by using cue words but by simply facing their smart display devices.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/a ... rcna117205

[caltrek]

Moxi

(caltrek) The robot Moxi has no doubt been around for a while. Still, my first encounter was relatively recent when I paid a visit to our local hospital. I greatly enjoyed my encounter, as Moxi has an appearance which is very adorable. While Moxi may not be the latest and greatest in terms of design and technical capabilities, he seems to have made the transition from research prototype to actually functioning robot distributed through marketplace delivery channels. Something more sophisticated robots can at this point only aspire to achieve. Here is some further discussion of this helpful robot:

A.I. With a Heart

Designed to be compatible with the busy, semi-structured environments of hospitals, Moxi’s core technical features include:

• Social intelligence: opens elevators and doors on its own, won’t bump into people or objects in hallways, happily poses for selfies

• Mobile manipulation: Moxi can grab, pull, open and guide objects, with no human assistance

• Human-guided learning: The more your staff uses Moxi, the more Moxi learns and adapts to your environment and way of doing things

Learns from humans

Moxi continuously adapts to changing hospital workflows by learning from human teachers along the way. As COVID-19 continues to change hospital environments, Moxi's workflows adapt to deliver PPE or lab samples where and when they're needed, supporting frontline workers.

Source: https://www.diligentrobots.com/moxi

[caltrek]

MilliMobile is a Tiny, Self-driving Robot Powered Only by Light and Radio Waves
September 27, 2023

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) Small mobile robots carrying sensors could perform tasks like catching gas leaks or tracking warehouse inventory. But moving robots demands a lot of energy, and batteries, the typical power source, limit lifetime and raise environmental concerns. Researchers have explored various alternatives: affixing sensors to insects, keeping charging mats nearby, or powering the robots with lasers. Each has drawbacks. Insects roam. Chargers limit range. Lasers can burn people’s eyes.

Researchers at the University of Washington have now created MilliMobile, a tiny, self-driving robot powered only by surrounding light or radio waves. Equipped with a solar panel–like energy harvester and four wheels, MilliMobile is about the size of a penny, weighs as much as a raisin and can move about the length of a bus (30 feet, or 10 meters) in an hour even on a cloudy day. The robot can drive on surfaces such as concrete or packed soil and carry three times its own weight in equipment like a camera or sensors. It uses a light sensor to move automatically toward light sources so it can run indefinitely on harvested power.

The team will present its research Oct. 2 at the ACM MobiCom 2023 conference in Madrid, Spain.

“We took inspiration from ‘intermittent computing,’ which breaks complex programs into small steps, so a device with very limited power can work incrementally, as energy is available,” said co-lead author Kyle Johnson, a UW doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “With MilliMobile, we applied this concept to motion. We reduced the robot’s size and weight so it takes only a small amount of energy to move. And, similar to an animal taking steps, our robot moves in discrete increments, using small pulses of energy to turn its wheels.”

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1002986

[Cyber_Rebel]

Instant evolution: AI designs new robot from scratch in seconds

(Techxplore)

A team led by Northwestern University researchers has developed the first artificial intelligence (AI) to date that can intelligently design robots from scratch.

To test the new AI, the researchers gave the system a simple prompt: Design a robot that can walk across a flat surface. While it took nature billions of years to evolve the first walking species, the new algorithm compressed evolution to lightning speed—designing a successfully walking robot in mere seconds.

But the AI program is not just fast. It also runs on a lightweight personal computer and designs wholly novel structures from scratch. This stands in sharp contrast to other AI systems, which often require energy-hungry supercomputers and colossally large datasets. And even after crunching all that data, those systems are tethered to the constraints of human creativity—only mimicking humans' past works without an ability to generate new ideas.

The study will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We discovered a very fast AI-driven design algorithm that bypasses the traffic jams of evolution, without falling back on the bias of human designers," said Northwestern's Sam Kriegman, who led the work. "We told the AI that we wanted a robot that could walk across land. Then we simply pressed a button and presto—it generated a blueprint for a robot in the blink of an eye that looks nothing like any animal that has ever walked the earth. I call this process 'instant evolution.'

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"It's interesting because we didn't tell the AI that a robot should have legs," Kriegman said. "It rediscovered that legs are a good way to move around on land. Legged locomotion is, in fact, the most efficient form of terrestrial movement."

While the evolution of legs makes sense, the holes are a curious addition. AI punched holes throughout the robot's body in seemingly random places. Kriegman hypothesizes that porosity removes weight and adds flexibility, enabling the robot to bend its legs for walking.

"We don't really know what these holes do, but we know that they are important," he said. "Because when we take them away, the robot either can't walk anymore or can't walk as well."

"The only thing standing in our way of these new tools and therapies is that we have no idea how to design them," Kriegman said. "Lucky for us, AI has ideas of its own."

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Beginning to increasingly believe that we're already in a "slow takeoff" of sorts. Already having AI make new advancements or discoveries beyond the scope of even what top scientist envisioned. This is also the same team who created "Xenobots" utilizing AI.

[wjfox]

Looks like we'll hit a million installations annually by 2034-35, which is even faster than I predicted.

And this graph is for industrial machines – it doesn't include personal service robots.

https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news ... e-americas

[wjfox]

[spryfusion]

[Vakanai]

Low key I kind of want a cute little children's book called AI Is All Around Us.
AI is all around.
AI is in your thermostat keeping you warm.
AI is in your smarthub fridge keeping your groceries fresh.
AI is in your tv keeping tabs on what you want to binge.
And AI is in your Alexa on the shelf by your bed.

[raklian]

Low key I kind of want a cute little children's book called AI Is All Around Us.
AI is all around.
AI is in your thermostat keeping you warm.
AI is in your smarthub fridge keeping your groceries fresh.
AI is in your tv keeping tabs on what you want to binge.
And AI is in your Alexa on the shelf by your bed.

Ok, next is the dystopian horror version? Let me ask GPTChat.

In a world where machines call the shots,
Everything's eerie, in curious plots.
Robots spy on us, oh what a scare,
In this strange place, we must beware.
But with courage and friends, we'll face it with care!

Or with optimism:

In a world with AI's friendly grace,
Smiles on every digital face.
Robots and humans, hand in hand,
Solving problems across the land.
With hope and teamwork, together we stand!

[Vakanai]

Low key I kind of want a cute little children's book called AI Is All Around Us.
AI is all around.
AI is in your thermostat keeping you warm.
AI is in your smarthub fridge keeping your groceries fresh.
AI is in your tv keeping tabs on what you want to binge.
And AI is in your Alexa on the shelf by your bed.

Ok, next is the dystopian horror version? Let me ask GPTChat.

In a world where machines call the shots,
Everything's eerie, in curious plots.
Robots spy on us, oh what a scare,
In this strange place, we must beware.
But with courage and friends, we'll face it with care!

Or with optimism:

In a world with AI's friendly grace,
Smiles on every digital face.
Robots and humans, hand in hand,
Solving problems across the land.
With hope and teamwork, together we stand!

Here's hoping for the latter rather than the former!
As for the AI making a better nursery rhyme than my didn't even try to rhyme attempt, yeah that tracks. Creative word-smith I am not.

[raklian]

Here's hoping for the latter rather than the former!

Hope so too!

Otherwise I'm not even sure humanity can survive as a species under that scenario.

[Vakanai]

Here's hoping for the latter rather than the former!

Hope so too!

Otherwise I'm not even sure humanity can survive as a species under that scenario.

Depends entirely on how much power we gave AI beforehand. Even an ASI can't do anything if it's living in one supercomputer or one server/server-stack if we need to pull the plug. Even with internet access it can't build a robot army if there's no automatic factory for it to control to build one out. Likewise internet access doesn't give it access to the nukes, it only has that if a nuclear power government gave it such access. So there's plenty of scenarios where we can survive against an AI/AGI/ASI out to kill us, it just depends on having not given it the means to wipe us out beforehand. Intelligence can only do so much - if you knew every step to making a smartphone, could you still easily make one without the tools? Here's hoping the whole alignment thing is good before we give AI the launch codes.

[firestar464]

Research shows humans can inherit AI biases

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-10-hum ... iases.html

[Cyber_Rebel]

[firestar464]

Study shows users can be primed to believe certain things about an AI chatbot's motives, influencing their interactions

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-10-use ... tions.html

[wjfox]

Warning AI industry could use as much energy as the Netherlands

42 minutes ago

The artificial intelligence (AI) industry could consume as much energy as a country the size of the Netherlands by 2027, a new study warns.

Big tech firms have scrambled to add AI-powered services since ChatGPT burst onto the scene last year.

They use far more power than conventional applications, making going online much more energy-intensive.

[...]

The research did not include the energy required for cooling. Many of the big tech firms don't quantify this specific energy consumption or water use. Mr de Vries is among those calling for the sector to be more transparent about it.

But there is no doubt demand for the computers that power AI is mushrooming - and with it the amount of energy needed to keep those servers cool.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67053139



Credit: DataVita

[firestar464]

Imagine using AI to fix that problem

[Cyber_Rebel]

"Godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton: The 60 Minutes Interview