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Gen AI models aren’t just good for creating pictures—they can be fine-tuned to generate useful robot training data, too.

Claire chatted to Gisela Reyes-Cruz from the University of Nottingham about how humans interact with, trust and accept robots.

Gisela Reyes-Cruz investigates human-computer and human-robot interaction to understand everyday life interactions with technologies, as well as trust in them and public acceptance. These technologies include autonomous and robotic systems: from mobile apps that have, or may have, a component that works autonomously, to robots that can navigate a physical space on their own, such as telepresence robots. The goal of Gisela’s work is to inform responsible system design and design practices.

A robot pangolin designed to plant trees is the winner of the 2023 Natural Robotics Contest, which rewards robot designs inspired by nature. As the winning entry, the pangolin—dubbed "Plantolin"—has been brought to life by engineers at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom.

A team of robotics engineers at ETH Zurich, Robotics Systems Lab, has modified an ANYbotics ANYMal quadruped robot to allow it to easily and effectively climb a standard ladder. The group has written a paper describing their efforts and results and has posted it on the arXiv preprint server.

The industry is coming off a record year in sales. It’s likely that we’ll see a small slowdown the remainder of this year due to customer inventories, but it’s expected to be short-lived. Overall shipments since the pandemic have continued to grow.

Sidewalk robots are set to help some of their airborne counterparts with deliveries in Dallas under an agreement between key players in the industry.

One of the key trends in the data that shows promise is that 60% of employees globally who have interacted with robotics and AI expect positive impacts on their safety, career development, and productivity.

A combined team of bio researchers and roboticists from Brigham and Women's Hospital, in the U.S., and the iPrint Institute, in Switzerland, has developed a tiny swimming robot using human motor neurons and cardiomyocytes grown to emulate muscle tissue.

Miniature robots on the millimeter scale often lack the strength to transport instruments for endoscopic microsurgery through the body. Scientists are now combining several millimeter-sized TrainBots into one unit and equipping them with improved 'feet'. For the first time, the team was able to perform an electric surgical procedure on a bile duct obstruction experimentally with a robotic convoy.

Researchers explored how infants act purposefully by attaching a colorful mobile to their foot and tracking movements with a Vicon 3D motion capture system. The study tested AI's ability to detect changes in infant movement patterns. Findings showed that AI techniques, especially the deep learning model 2D-CapsNet, effectively classified different stages of behavior. Notably, foot movements varied significantly. Looking at how AI classification accuracy changes for each baby gives researchers a new way to understand when and how they start to engage with the world.

Jeannette and her team task the robot with tidying up a room: pick up all objects off the floor and put each object where it belongs. One of the key challenges when performing this task is determining the correct receptacle for each object.

Engineers developed a system that helps robots quickly map a scene and identify items they need to complete a set of tasks.

Imagine having to straighten up a messy kitchen, starting with a counter littered with sauce packets. If your goal is to wipe the counter clean, you might sweep up the packets as a group. If, however, you wanted to first pick out the mustard packets before throwing the rest away, you would sort more discriminately, by sauce type. And if, among the mustards, you had a hankering for Grey Poupon, finding this specific brand would entail a more careful search.

SenseRobot Chess has achieved a significant breakthrough, mastering complex engineering challenges that allow its intelligent robotic arms to precisely grasp and position 3D chess pieces — marking a first in household robotics.

AI Engineer Snags $2.7 Billion to Sign With Google

If you’re chatting-up your boss for a raise, you may want to reference the deal Noam Shazeer just cut with Google.

A former Google employee that the tech titan sorely missed, the AI wunderkind was happy to let bygones be bygones — for a mere $2.7 billion signing fee.

Shazeer is one of the early pioneers of what were to become AI chatbots — the tech that powers most of today’s auto-writers.

Technically speaking, Google also purchased Shazeer’s start-up company — Character.AI — as part of his rehire.

But “within Google, Shazeer’s return is widely viewed as the primary reason the company agreed to pay the multibillion-dollar licensing fee,” according to writer Miles Kruppa.

Brings new meaning to the song lyric, “Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.”

In other news and analysis on AI writing:

*In-Depth Guide: Meeting Minutes, Minus the Misery: Zoom’s AI Meeting Note-Taker: Wired reviewer John Brandon offers an in-depth look at new AI for Zoom software — dubbed ‘AI Companion’ — that auto-generates meeting notes and summaries.

AI Companion can also tell you who talked the most during a Zoom meeting — and even gauge the meeting’s overall emotional tone, according to Brandon.

Brandon’s verdict: “Overall, the AI Companion saved time in an important way: No one had to take notes in any of my meetings, and the final summaries were all quite useful. No clicking or clacking!”

*Brain Transplant: Google Adds ‘Copilot’ Type Chatbot to Its Workspace Suite: In an effort to compete with ‘Copilot’ — an AI chatbot that Microsoft offers for use in its business productivity suite — Google has added a similar AI chatbot to its competing suite, Workplace.

Observes writer Emilia David: “Workspace users in the Business, Enterprise and Frontline plans will automatically get access to the Gemini app that’s now built into the platform.

“Workspace offers enterprises access to a large swath of Google products — Gmail, Docs and Calendars — but with the option of using their own domains and enterprise-level security. “

*Salesforce Promising ‘Copilot Killer:’ Deriding Microsoft’s Copilot as little more than an annoying time-waster, Salesforce is promising to roll-out a competing product for its own workplace productivity suite.

Dubbed ‘Agentforce,’ the AI system is designed to make it easier to use business software — and to integrate with hundreds of business applications.

Observes writer Sasha Rogelberg: “It’s part of a growing movement of implementing AI agents over copilots to take tech assistance one step further.”

*The End of I Never Said That?: Editors and writers looking for an easy way to record — and instantly transcribe — in-person interviews may want to check-out the Plaud-AI pin.

Powered by ChatGPT, the $169, soon-to-be-released tech comes with 300 free, monthly transcription minutes, according to writer Brian Heater.

Observes Heater: “The recordings are saved on your phone in real time. And from there you can decide whether to upload them for transcription — depending on how robust a monthly subscription you have.”

*Chatbots Gone Wild: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Third Reich: The Wall Street Journal became the latest to find out the hard way that hosting an experimental AI chatbot can be an egg-on-face experience.

Specifically: Pranksters recently spoofed an experimental WSJ chatbot — designed to offer iPhone information — to instead spout Hitler talk.

Observes writer Joanna Stern: “Like my three-year-old, bots struggle to follow the rules.”

*AI a Hit Among UK Lawyers: Increasing numbers of UK legal pros are going all-in on AI, according to a new survey from LexisNexis.

Researchers found that 41% of 800+ legal pros surveyed are currently using AI for work.

Observes writer Caroline Hill: “Lawyers with plans to use AI for legal work in the near future also jumped from 28% to 41%, while those with no plans to adopt AI dropped from 61% to 15%.”

*ChatGPT CEO’s Crystal Ball on Our Future: Everyone Wins the Lottery?: Sam Altman — the AI wunderkind that made ChatGPT and AI household words the world over — predicts AI’s impact on the future will most likely be so overwhelmingly positive, it’s unimaginable.

Observes Altman: “How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity?

“In three words: Deep learning worked.

“In 15 words: Deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale — and we dedicated increasing resources to it.”

*Free-for-All: Open-Source AI Gets Another Boost: Fans of open-source AI software — released free to the world on the theory that the real money is in the apps to be built atop it — have something new to cheer about.

Facebook’s parent Meta has released an upgrade to its AI software that competes directly with the AI engine undergirding ChatGPT.

Dubbed Llama 3.2, the AI engine is still a bit weaker than the one running ChatGPT.

But long-run, the competition is sure to help keep AI prices lower.

*AI Big Picture: Hungry for Cash, ChatGPT-Maker on the Hunt for Unthinkable Billions: Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI, is currently on a world tour attempting to convince players in the computer industry to cooperatively build the next generation of AI data centers.

Altman insists the world will need a spate of these centers to fully realize AI’s potential.

The cost of each new center: A cool $100 billion, he says.

Observes writer Cade Metz: “OpenAI believes this kind of technology could be the future of its business. If it can get its hands on more computing power, its AI can learn to do more. At least, that is the theory.”

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–Joe Dysart is editor of RobotWritersAI.com and a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.

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