Robotics

Shinkei Systems developed a machine that uses computer vision to slaughter fish in a way that maximizes their shelf life and flavor.

FamilyMart, a chain of Japanese convenience stores, plans to employ robots to fill shelves with beverage bottles at 300 locations.

Robots trained via reinforcement learning usually study videos of robots performing the task at hand. A new approach used videos of humans to pre-train robotic arms.

A weaponized AI system intended to protect students has been grounded.What’s new: Axon, which makes law-enforcement equipment such as tasers and body cameras, canceled a plan to sell remote-controlled drones capable of firing

Researchers took a step toward achieving a longstanding goal: One model that performs a whole lot of very different tasks.What's new: Scott Reed, Konrad Żołna, Emilio Parisotto and a team at

Hospitals are using robots to lighten the load on clinical staff.What’s new: A number of U.S. hospitals are using Moxi, a robot from Diligent Robotics, to ferry supplies, lab specimens, soiled laundry, and other items, Wired

A dog doesn’t think twice about fetching a tennis ball, but an autonomous robot typically suffers from delays between perception and action. A new machine-learning model helped a quadruped robot coordinate its sensors and actuators.

Research challenges long-held assumptions about how automation will affect employment.What’s new: Studies in various countries found that automation is associated with more jobs, fewer working hours

Visual robots typically perceive the three-dimensional world through sequences of two-dimensional images, but they don’t always know what they’re looking at. For instance, Tesla’s self-driving system has been known to mistake a full moon for a

Machines are doing light janitorial work in the uncontrolled environment of Google’s offices. Everyday Robots, a new spin-out from Google’s experimental X Development division, unleashed 100 robots to perform an array of cleanup tasks.

Things are really starting to get going in the field of AI. After many years (decades?!) of focusing on algorithms, the AI community is finally ready to accept the central role of data and the high-capacity models that are capable of taking advantage of this data.

Robots are tremendously useful machines, and I would like to see them applied to every task where they can do some good. Yet we don’t have enough programmers for all this hardware and all these tasks.

Flippy 2, a robotic fry station from California-based Miso Robotics, has been newly deployed in a Chicago White Castle location.

A new machine learning method aims to improve a machine’s ability to determine and locate points of interest.

War is already bad enough. What happens when human combatants are replaced by machines?