Saturday, December 29, 2018

Robopocalypse Report #111

Drones:

The first global standards for drones have been unveiled.

A 737 seems to have been damaged by a midair impact with a drone.

Amazon promised drone delivery in five years...five years ago.  Where are they?

In Britain, the Gatwick airport was seriously impacted by one or more drones flying through restricted air space.  The Army was deployedPeople were arrested and then released.  A British Minister stated new detection equipment is needed.

Drones are being used in Britain to spot European nightjar nests.

The Dauntless cargo UAV can lift 200 lbs.

Regular drones are being used to monitor and track sharks.

Drones can be used to replace several cameras in film making and even used in animation.

Foldable drones could be used in rescues because they can fly through smaller holes.

Google/Alphabet's Project Wing drones will start delivery trials in Finland next year.

Google/Alphabet is working to make those drones quieter.

Indonesian rescuers are using drones after the recent tsunami.

The NYPD will start using drones.

The number of drone flights in Russia are projected to increase 16 fold from 2015 to 2020.

Russia has demonstrated a new cargo drone with claims it is capable of carrying 400 kg (880 lbs) 350 km (~220 miles).

The Self Repairing Cities Project continues to develop 3d printing drones that repair potholes.

Self Driving Cars:

Congress did not pass its self driving car laws before the end of 2018.

How self driving cars handle tricky highway merges.

Self driving cars are here.  Here just depends on where you live.

Audi is using Luminar's lidar for its self driving cars.

Baidu is testing its self driving cars with the Unity game.

Bosch is developing self driving tech.  Even betting on it.

GM Cruise's has a new boss, Dan Ammann.

Honda is testing off road self driving work vehicles.

Kroger has launched a self driving vehicle based service for grocery delivery in Arizona with Nuro's help.

Levandowski, the troublesome ex Google, ex Uber self driving car engineer who founded a church that believes AI is the savior, claims to have ridden a self driving car from the Atlantic to the Pacific, over 3000 miles.

A Lyft patent shows how their self driving cars might communicate.

May Mobility is another self driving car startup.

Rinspeed has shrunk its self driving pod.

Tesla celebrates over 1 billion miles using Autopilot.

Musk is stating Tesla's Autopilot will recognize emergency vehicles shortly.

Musk misused Tesla's Autopilot on the tv show 60 minutes.

Tesla is testing its Autopilot system for successful navigation of traffic lights and roundabouts.

TuSimple's cameras can see farther than lidars can for self driving cars.

Uber apparently ignored warnings about its safety before the death of the woman in Arizona.

Uber got permission to return its self driving cars to the road in Pennsylvania in a scaled down test.

Volvo's self driving trucks will be hauling limestone from a mine.

As reported before, Waymo has returned safety drivers to its self driving cars.

Waymo has already launched its self driving car service in Phoenix.  They still have safety drivers as noted above.

People are harassing Waymo's self driving cars.

Zoox has won approval to carry passengers in its self driving vehicles in California.

3d Printing:

3d printed houses vary from mud huts to luxury mansions.

A software bots are able to recreate famous paintings in 3d printing.

An Australian woman has received a 3d printed jaw after a tumor removal.

Bugatti is testing 3d printed titanium parts for its cars.

A Bulgarian patient has received a 3d printed rib, a first for that country.

A custom 3d printer makes better microfluidic devices.

Harvard Innovation Labs has set up the MakerFleet 3d printer farm.

3d printed scaffolds could help bones heal.

3d printed homes may be the future of architecture.

An Italian bioengineer figured out how to 3d print a steak from vegetable proteins.

A new paper states there needs to be a better way to allow more people to design 3d printed components.

Norwegian researchers compared the results of 3d printing in both a factory setting and in a military cargo container. 

Robotics:


A new type of robotic hand can play the piano with more human like motion.

Where are the SciFi promised home robots?

Amazon is launching a cloud-based robotics testing platform.

Amazon is trying to get developers to make the control software for small robotic car.

24 Amazon workers were sent to the hospital when a warehouse robot broke open a can of bear spray.

Arm is building chips with a sense of smell.

BART is a type of bar tending robot.

DHL will spend $300 million to quadruple the robots in their warehouses.

European scientists have made an artificial neuron from nanowire.

Studying fish will help robotics.

Harvard developed a robot that can climb on ceilings.

A new huggable robot about to go on sale looks eerily like Cheburashka.

Intel has developed a wheelchair controlled by facial expressions.

Kiwi, a delivery bot, caught fire in Berkeley, California.

Larvalbot has been seeding the Great Barrier Reef with coral.

Postmates unveiled its robotic delivery bot.

A Robotic rice planter is being sent to the fields.

Toyota has invested in the autonomous ship company, Sea Machine Robotics.

The Velox robot skates over ice, but does so in way that creeps some people out.

Waitrose and Partner's parent company is testing in robotic farming equipment.

Walmart is rolling out 360 mopping robots as janitors for its stores by the end of January.  The same robots are in use at airports in Boston, Miami, San Diego, and Seattle,

Walmart is also supposed to be testing a burger flipping robot.

Youbionic has added 3d printed arms to a Boston Dynamics Mini Spot robot.

The Z6 robot is an unfolding hexapod.

Cyborgism:


Meet Elowan, the first(?) mobile cyborg houseplant.

Researchers have developed a new hydrogel electrode for brain implants.

A new artificial joint allows lower arm amputees to have wrist movements.

Software Bots:

US law makers are seeking to introduce bills to make certain actions illegal for bots during the holiday season.

100 AI researchers could not get visas to Canada for a conference.

Canada and France want to study the global impacts of AI.

Alibaba's Voice Assistant is way better than Google's.

An Amazon Alexa had a software error that allowed another user in another house to spy on one house hold.

Alexa is gaining self teaching algorithms to be able to learn from the people its communicating with to better understand them.

The BBC asked two software bots to come up with christmas dishes that were inspired by cultures around the world.

In China, a facial recognition software bot took an ad on the bus for a jaywalker.

Digital assistants are getting better, but have a long, long ways to go.

Europe actually publishes the most papers on AI, not China or the US.

Can software bots actually clean up Facebook?

Google's head of AI research wants bots to think more like a brain does.

Google's not being as open as it ought over the Duplex calls.

Google's Deep Mind can predict the 3d shape of proteins.

Google Deep Mind now has a generalized game playing system for any sort of game.

IBM is looking at Watson for human resources.

The Japanese have developed an automated technique for coloring anime.

Memristers are making circuits that mimic synapses better.

Microsoft wants to stop facial recognition AI's 'race to the bottom.'

MIT and Facebook are teaming up to use bots to give everyone who does NOT have a address in the world one.

Musicians are using software bots to master songs.

NBCUniversal is attempting to use software bots to make their ads more relevant.

Communication between two neural networks is being worked on.

Nvidia has developed a software bot to generate cityscapes in real time.

Nvidia has also released its new machine learning chip.

Oregon State University is looking at using machine learning to work on energy storage.

Texas A&M is using software bots for material science.

The UK is looking at AI to predict and prevent violent crime:  pre crime, here we come.

Software bots can be used to detect water leaks in city water systems.

Software bots can accelerate cancer discoveries.

Software bots can be trained without negative data.

Software bots can reduce the gadolinium dose needed for MRIs.

A new software bot can track biological age on multiple levels.

Bots are also being used to tell how healthy you will be in old age.

Software bots have mapped every last solar panel in the US.

Software bots are being used for hiring now and its producing some unorthodox results.

A new form of machine vision uses software bots to recognize objects like people do.

Software bots are being used to determine if you could have a potentially life threatening skin infection.

Software bots are being used to notice details in low exposure images.

Software bots are being used to design peptides.

Software bots can sort cancer cells now.

Codeveloping hardware and software makes neural nets less power hungry.

Technology companies and employees are pushing back against software bots, or at least putting limits on them.  Some.

Tumblr is banning porn on its site and has developed a software bot to find and delete it.  It's really bad at its job.

Automation:

2018 was the year bots began taking over service jobs.

Automation is changing work.

Amazon is testing its cashierless system on larger stores than their Amazon Go.

Amazon wants to open its Go stores in company lobbies.

Space Tango plans a orbital robotic factory.

META:

Can an AI conference shed its sexist behavior?

Germany will attempt a universal basic income experiment in 2019.

New models can sense when and if people trust robots. Think of them as your robotic rat friends.

While the robopocalypse may be upon us, the singularity has a long, long ways to go.

Do not fear the robotic overlords!  Embrace them as coworkers!

The year in the robopocalypse.

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