The US Army recently announced that it is developing the first drones that can spot and target vehicles and people using artificial intelligence (AI). This is a big step forward. Whereas current military drones are still controlled by people, this new technology will decide who to kill with almost no human involvement.
A new round of talks on the use of so-called killer robots reopened at the United Nations on Monday, with a focus on defining the characteristics of autonomous lethal weapons.
Researchers say that artificial intelligence (AI) is now superior to human intelligence in supervised learning using vast amounts of labeled data to perform specific tasks. However, it is considered difficult to realize human-like intelligence using only supervised learning because all supervised labels cannot be obtained for all the sensory information required by robots.
On the morning of March 21, a white Austin police bomb squad truck pulled out of an obscure city facility near Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and rolled north, toward Pflugerville.
Late in 2017 at a tech fair in Austria, a sex robot was "molested" repeatedly and left in a "filthy" state. The robot, named Samantha, received a barrage of male attention, which resulted in her sustaining two broken fingers. This incident confirms worries that the possibility of fully functioning sex robots raises both tantalising possibilities for human desire (by mirroring human/sex-worker relationships), as well as serious ethical questions.
A new original research report available ahead-of-print at SLAS Technology demonstrates the semi-automation of a GlycoWorks RapiFluor-MS (RFMS) Kit using a pipetting robot to improve life sciences research productivity. This robotic platform uses standard manual pipettors and an optically guided arm to facilitate the automation of manual procedures, reducing the time researchers spend at the lab bench, and mimicking, as closely as possible, the results obtained when using the manual GlycoWorks RFMS protocol.
It's small enough to fit inside a shoebox, yet this robot on four wheels has a big mission: keeping factories and other large facilities safe from hackers.
Robby Pepper can answer questions in Italian, English and German. Billed as Italy's first robot concierge, the humanoid will be deployed all season at a hotel on the popular Lake Garda to help relieve the desk staff of simple, repetitive questions.
If you were to ask someone to name a new technology that emerged from MIT in the 21st century, there's a good chance they would name the robotic cheetah. Developed by the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering's Biomimetic Robotics Lab under the direction of Associate Professor Sangbae Kim, the quadruped MIT Cheetah has made headlines for its dynamic legged gait, speed, jumping ability, and biomimetic design.
A short electric pulse is all it takes to generate and release a powerful vacuum in the blink of an eye. The novel vacuum gripper developed by the research team led by Professor Stefan Seelecke at Saarland University enables robot arms to pick up objects and move them around freely in space. The system works without the need for compressed air to generate the vacuum, it is energy efficient, quiet and suitable for use in clean rooms. The specialists for intelligent materials systems make use of artificial muscles, which are bundles of ultrafine shape memory wires that are able to tense and relax just as real muscle fibres do. The wires also function as sensors and can sense, for example, when the gripper needs to readjust or tighten its grip.
An innovative new type of robotic arm that could be useful in outer space or in the orchards has been developed by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers.
Assistive devices may soon allow people to perform virtually superhuman feats. According to Robert Riener, however, there are more pressing goals than developing superhumans.
A pair of autonomous robots developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute will soon be driving through miles of pipes at the U.S. Department of Energy's former uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio, to identify uranium deposits on pipe walls.
Are we bumping up against the "Robocalypse," when automation sweeps industry and replaces human workers with machines? BU economist Pascual Restrepo says that interpretation is too gloomy, although his recent research, posted online by the National Bureau of Economic Research, reveals that the adoption of just one industrial robot eliminates nearly six jobs in a community.
As a teenager working for his dad's construction business, Noah Ready-Campbell dreamed that robots could take over the dirty, tedious parts of his job, such as digging and leveling soil for building projects.