A pioneer in dishwashing robots is reaching into commercial kitchens. Dishcraft Robotics uses machines equipped with computer vision to scrub dirties for corporate food services and, soon, restaurants.

Robot vacuum cleaners are pretty good at navigating rooms, but they still get stuck in tight spaces. New work takes a step toward giving them the smarts they’ll need to escape the bathroom.

Seeking a robot star for your movie, music video, or bat mitzvah? You need a new breed of talent scout. Ai-gen-cy is an artist management firm that exclusively represents robots, reports GeekWire.

Glass bottles and crystal bowls bend light in strange ways. Image processing networks often struggle to separate the boundaries of transparent objects from the background that shows through them. A new method sees such items more accurately.

Bored with your Spotify playlists? Let this robot singer/songwriter take you on a trip “Into Your Mind.” A music-composing, marimba-playing robot named Shimon has learned to write and sing its own lyrics, IEEE Spectrum reports.

Amputees can control a robotic hand with their thoughts — plus machine learning. University of Michigan researchers developed a system that uses signals from an amputee’s nervous system to control a prosthetic hand.

AI is good at tracking objects in two dimensions. A new model processes video from a camera with a depth sensor to predict how objects move through space.

Faster than a speeding skateboard! Able to dodge tall trees while chasing a dirt bike! It’s … an upgrade in the making from an innovative drone maker.

Robots are moving into a job that traditionally required the human touch.What’s new: A commercial warehouse that ships electrical supplies deployed AI-driven robotic arms from Covariant, a high-profile Silicon Valley robotics firm.

Many people in the AI community focus on achieving flashy results, like building an agent that can win at Go or Jeopardy. This kind of work is impressive in terms of complexity.

We’ve had great success with supervised deep learning on labeled data. Now it’s time to explore other ways to learn: training on unlabeled data, lifelong learning, and especially letting models explore a simulated environment before transferring what they learn to the real world.

A year-long Twitter feud breathed fresh life into a decades-old argument over AI’s direction. Gary Marcus, a standard bearer of logic-based AI, waged a tireless Twitter campaign to knock deep learning off its pedestal and promote other AI approaches.

The future of machine learning may depend less on amassing ground-truth data than simulating the environment in which a model will operate. Deep learning works like magic with enough high-quality data. When examples are scarce, though, researchers are using simulation to fill the gap.

Reinforcement learning trains models by trial and error. In batch reinforcement learning (BRL), models learn by observing many demonstrations by a variety of actors. But what if one doctor is handier with a scalpel while another excels at suturing?

Sony, the consumer-electronics powerhouse behind the PlayStation and other hit gadgets, is launching three research-and-design centers to focus on AI. Staffing up means competing with — and likely poaching talent from — frontrunners like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.