The European Commission is launching a new call for Flagships. Existing Flagships include the Human Brian Project, and the Graphene Flagship – each funded at the level of 1B EUR.
Given the excitement around the field of robotics and its potential to benefit society and the economy, we’ve brought together the robotics community to apply for a Robotics Flagship Preparatory Action. The Robotics Flagship aims to drive developments in European Robotics for the next 10 years. You can read more about it on this website.
As a first step, we’ll be submitting a request for exploratory funds to inform the preparation of the full flagship proposal.
Key to our work will be to understand the robotics community’s and the public’s view on the technology so we can develop it in a way that positively impacts society and the economy.
That’s why we need your help. By filling in a short call for evidence (max 10 minutes) you’ll be providing us with valuable input for the proposal.
If you’re from the public, fill in this call for evidence.
If you’re from the robotics community, fill in this call for evidence.
You can also follow us on twitter, and help spread the word by RTing:
Help us make the European Robotics Flagship a reality, fill in our short call for evidence and RT https://t.co/IxQKuRYFJj
— Robotics Flagship (@robotflagship) February 14, 2018
In this episode of Robots in Depth, Per Sjöborg speaks with Dave Rollinson from Hebi Robotics about their modular robotics systems.
Dave shares how he had the opportunity to work with sewer inspection robots early on. He learned a lot from constantly bringing the robots out in the field. Seeing how the robots were used, as regular tools, and how they succeeded and failed helped him iterate the design and take the steps needed to create a well-functioning product.
Dave also talks about how he wanted to continue to build robots as he continued his education. He chose to go to Howie Choset’s laboratory at CMU because they build their own hardware.
We get the opportunity to see one of the modular robotics system Hebi is working on live, and a few examples of how it is being used.
At the end of the interview, Dave and the host Per, who is a major modular robotics fan, discuss the significance of modularity in robotics and how it can change how we develop and use robots and machines.
In a shocker, it was announced that Uber and Waymo (Google/Alphabet) have settled their famous lawsuit for around $245 million in Uber stock. No cash, and Uber agrees it won’t use any Google hardware or software trade secrets — which it of course had always denied that it ever did.
I think this is a tremendous victory for Uber. Google had proposed a $1B settlement early on that was rejected. Waymo had not yet provided all the evidence necessary to show damages, but one has to presume they had more to come that made Uber feel it should settle. Of course, the cloud of a lawsuit and years of appeals over their programs and eventual IPO also were worth closing out.
What’s great for Uber is that it’s a stock deal. While the number is not certain, some estimates suggest that this amount of stock might not be much more than the shares of Uber lost by Anthony Levandowski when he was fired for not helping with the lawsuit. In other words, Uber fixes the problems triggered by Anthony’s actions by paying off Waymo with the stock they used to buy Otto from Anthony. They keep the team (which is really what they bought, since at 7 months of age, Otto had done some impressive work but nothing worth $700M) and they get clear of the lawsuit.
The truth is, Uber can’t be in a fight with Google. All Uber rides are booked through the platforms of Google and Apple. Without those platforms there is no Uber. I am not suggesting that Apple or Google would do illegal-monopoly tricks to fight Uber. They don’t have to, though there are some close-to-the-line tricks they could use that don’t violate anti-trust but make Uber’s life miserable. You simply don’t want to be in a war for your existence with the platform you depend on for that existence.
Instead, Alphabet now increases its stake in Uber. They are now more motivated to be positively inclined to it. There is still going to be a heavy competition between Waymo and Uber, but Waymo now has this incentive not to hurt Uber too much.
For a long time, it had seemed like there would be a fantastic synergy between the companies. Google had been an early investor in Uber. Waymo has the world’s #1 robocar technology. Uber has the world’s #1 brand in selling rides — the most important use of that technology. Together they would have ruled the world. That never happened, and is unlikely to happen now (though no longer impossible). Alphabet has instead invested in Lyft.
Absent working with Lyft or Uber, Waymo needs to create its own ride service on the scale that Uber has. Few companies could enter that market convincingly today, but Alphabet is one of those few. Yet they have never done this. You need to do more than a robot ride service. Robocars won’t take you from anywhere to anywhere for decades, and so you need a service that combines robocar rides on the popular routes, and does the long tail rides with human drivers. Uber and Lyft are very well poised to deliver that; Waymo is not.
Uber settles this dangerous lawsuit for “free” and turns Alphabet back from an enemy to a frenemy. They get to go ahead full steam, and if they botch their own self-drive efforts they still have the option of buying somebody else’s technology, even Waymo’s. With new management they are hoping to convince the public they aren’t chaotic neutral any more. I think they have come out of this pretty well.
For Waymo, what have they won? Well, they got some Uber stock, which is nice but it’s just money. Alphabet has immense piles of money that this barely dents. They stuck it to Anthony, and retarded Uber for a while. The hard reality is that many companies are developing long-range LIDAR like they alleged Anthony stole for Uber. When they built it, and Otto tried to build it, nobody had it for sale. Time has past and that’s just not as much of an advantage as it used to be. In addition, Waymo has put their focus (correctly) on urban driving, not the highway driving where long range LIDAR is so essential. While Anthony won’t use the knowledge he gained on the Waymo team to help Uber, several other former team members are there, and while they can’t use any trade secrets (and couldn’t before, really) their experience is not so restricted.
For the rest of the field, they can no longer chuckle at their rivals fighting. Not so great news for Lyft and other players.
I recently led a group of 20 American tech investors to Israel in conjunction with the UJA and Israel’s Ministry of Economy and Industry. We witnessed firsthand the innovation that has produced more than $22 billion of investments and acquisitions within the past year. We met with the University that produced Mobileye, with the investor that believed in its founder, and the network of every multinational company supporting the startup ecosystem. Mechatronics is blooming in the desert from the CyberTech Convention in Tel Aviv to the robotic labs at Capsula to the latest in autonomous driving inventions in the hills of Jerusalem.
Sitting in a suspended conference room that floats three stories above the ground enclosed within the “greenest building in the Middle East,” I had the good fortune to meet Torr Polakow of Curiosity Lab. Torr is the PhD student of famed roboticist Dr. Goren Gordon. Gordon’s research tests the boundaries of human-robot social interactions. At the 2014 World Science Fair in New York City, Gordon partnered with MIT professor, and Jibo founder, Dr. Cynthia Breazeal to prove it is possible to teach machines to be curious. The experiment was conducted by embedding into Breazeal’s DragonBot (below) a reinforcement learning algorithm that enabled the robot to acquire its own successful behaviors to engage humans. The scientists programmed within the robot nine non-verbal expressions and a reward system that was activated based upon its ability to engage crowds. The greater the number of faces staring back at the robot the bigger the reward. After two hours it successfully learned that by deploying its”sad face” with big eyes, that evokes Puss-in-Boots from the movie Shrek, it captured the most sustained attention from the audience. The work of Gordon and Breazeal opened up the field of social robots and the ability to teach computers human empathy, which will eventually be deployed in fleets of mechanical caregivers for our aging society. Gordon is now working tirelessly to create a mathematical model of “Hierarchical Curiosity Loops (HCL)” for “curiosity-driven behavior” to “increase our understanding of the brain mechanisms behind it.”
Traveling east, we met with Yissum the tech transfer arm of Hebrew University, the birth place of the cherry tomato and Mobileye. The history of the automative startup that became the largest Israeli Initial Public Offering, and later a $15.3 billion acquisition by Intel, is a great example of how today’s Israeli innovations are evolving more quickly into larger enterprises than at anytime in history. Mobileye was founded in 1999 by Professor Amnon Shashua, a leader in computer vision and machine learning software. Dr. Shashua realized early on that his technology had wider applications for industries outside of Israel, particularly automative. Supported by his University, Mobileye’s first product, EyeQ chip, was piloted by Tier 1 powerhouse Denso within years of inception. While it took Mobileye 18 years to achieve full liquidity, Israeli cybersecurity startup, Argus, was sold last month to Elektrobit for a rumored $400 million within just four years from its founding. Shashua’s latest computer vision startup, OrCam, is focusing on giving sight to people with impaired vision.
In addition to Shahua’s successful portfolio of startups, computer vision innovator Professor Shmuel Peleg is probably most famous for catching the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombers using his imaging-tracking software. Dr. Peleg’s company, BriefCam, tracks anomalies in multiple video feeds at once, layering simultaneous events on top of one another. This technique autonomously isolated the Boston bombers by programing in known aspects of their appearance into the system (e.g., men with backpacks), and then isolating the suspects by their behavior. For example, as everyone was watching the marathon minutes before the explosion, the video captured the Tsarnaev brothers leaving the scene after dropping their backpacks on the street. BriefCam’s platform made it possible for the FBI to capture the perpetrators within 101 hours of the event, versus manually sifting through the more than 13,000 videos and 120,000 photographs taken by stationary and cell phone cameras.
This past New Year’s Eve, BriefCam was deployed by the New York City to secure the area around Times Square. In a joint statement by the FBI, NYPD, Department of Homeland Security and the New York Port Authority the authorities exclaimed that they plan to deploy BriefCam’s Video Synopsis across all their video cameras as they “remain concerned about international terrorists and domestic extremists potentially targeting” the celebration. According to Peleg, “You can take the entire night and instead of watching 10 hours you can watch ten minutes. You can detect these people and check what they are planning.”
BriefCam is just one of thousands of new innovations entering the SmartCity landscape from Israel. In the past three years, 400 new smart mobility startups have opened shop in Israel accumulating over $4 billion in investment. During that time, General Motor’s Israeli research & development office went from a few engineers to more than 200 leading computer scientists and roboticists. In fact, Tel Aviv now is a global hub of innovation of every major car manufacturer and automobile supplier, encircling many new accelerators and international consortiums, from the Drive Accelerator to Ecomotion, which seem to be opening up faster than Starbucks in the United States.
As the auto industry goes through its biggest revolution in 100 years, the entire world’s attention is now centered on this small country known for ground-breaking innovation. In the words of Israel’s Innovation Authority, “The acquisition of Mobileye by Intel this past March for $15.3 billion, one of the largest transactions in the field of auto-tech in 2017, has focused the attention of global corporations and investors on the tremendous potential of combining Israeli technological excellence with the autonomous vehicle revolution.”