Saturday, June 01, 2019

Robopocalypse Report #116

Drones:

The US government went after Huwei and is now going after drone maker DJI warning the Chinese gov may have the data from the drones.

Alphabet (*cough*Google*cough*) will start offering drone deliveries in Helsinki starting next month.

Students at Ben-Gurion University in Israel have developed a drone that can land and drive like a car.

Caltech's Neural Lander can smoothly land quadcopters.

DJI drones will detect aircraft soon.

Drones are being sent into tornadoes to study them.

Japan is about to make drunk droning, flying a drone while intoxicated, illegal.

Purdue developing a hovering hummingbird drone.

USC has created Bee+, a four winged nano UAV.

This is the Volgi VTOL UAV.

Self Driving Cars:

Self driving cars will do more than drive you around.

In a bad sign for traffic improvements with self driving cars, Uber and Lyft are making traffic worse in San Francisco.  A study by Cambridge disputes my assertion though.

There is a robot race car club in northern California.

Aurora, the self driving car startup, bought lidar sensor company Blackmore.

Einride has started doing deliveries in Sweden with its self driving truck.

GM's Cruise division just got a $1 billion investment.

An MIT paper calls into question some of the assumptions of self driving car economics.

MIT is teaching self driving cars to navigate using just maps and signs, just like people do.

Nissan has a different opinion of lidar than does Musk.

Self driving wheel chairs are being tested.

A Tesla that was involved in a fatal crash had its autopilot engaged.  The safety of Tesla's Autopilot is being challenged.

Problems are mounting for Tesla.  Apple tried to buy Tesla is 2013 and with things looking grim at Tesla, may try again.

Betting on Uber is a bet on self driving cars.  It is the only way for them to be profitable.

USPS is experimenting with using self driving trucks.

Waymo's self driving cars are now available to pick you up in Phoenix via the Lyft app and hundreds have already used them.

3d Printing:

An Australian man has a 3d printed titanium replacement sternum.

The world's first 3d printed village is coming to Central America courtesy of Icon.

Bioprinting for bone regeneration with nanofibers.

3d printed guns are back and on the darkweb.

3d printed bathrooms...in a day.

Robots:

The Aqua2 robot is a amphibious spin off of a joint university development.

Brown University taught a robot to copy art and hand writing.

Columbia came up with a material so robots can use water?

Meet Eve r3.

Inside Facebook's new robotics lab.

Ford is using a self driving robot in its factories to free up workers' time.



Ford also wants to use a robot in conjunction with self driving vehicles to make deliveries.

Introducing the Heron USV.


Watch the HyQReal robot tow a passenger plane.

Meet Laikago.

MIT's Roboraise learns to lift objects by watching a persn.


NASA Langley is working on soft robots.

Watch the leech bot climb a wall.  Yeech.

A new micro robot has been developed that changes shape while swimming in a patient's circulatory system.

Put googly eyes on robots to make them less scary.

Soft robots can be made of warm, nice materials to make homes...cozy.

Stanford students built a robo dog and shared the code.

Software Bots:

The US gov is backing international standards on AI principles.

China ramped up the censor bots with the anniversary of Tiananmen Square.

CMU is trying to make AI seem less intrusive, even if it is really powerful.

Facebook's AI is being accused of generating terrorist content by a whistleblower.  It makes you wonder how instrumental they were in influencing things.

Facebook is categorizing your private posts using a software bot.

Facebook is using software bots to build disease prevention maps.

Google's Geoff Hinton explains the evolution of neural networks.

Google is training its speech recognition bots to be able to work with people with speech impediments.  

Google trained its software bot to predict lung cancer.

Many Google Duplex calls are really people.  This is starting to sound like a scam.

Microsoft's Cortana will eventually sound like a person.

Microsoft is also using software bots to improve your writing in Word.

Microsoft wants to use software bots to improve the application development cycle.

Microsoft trains bots to have realistic speech with minimal training.

MIT has a new software bot that is significantly better at IDing breast cancer from mammograms.

Nvidia's software bots are set to start chewing on UK medical scans.

Can all optical networks be used for neural networks?

ObEN is a company working on AI avatars.

Samsung's software bot can make Deep Fakes from single pictures, including the Mona Lisa.

A new software bot generates people from scratch, clothes, bodies, faces and all.

Software bots may be the entertainers of the future.

Software bots attempted to name race horses...

Software bot mistakes for imagine recognition might be due to human error than the bots making mistakes.

A software bot driven Salvador Dali is now live at a Florida museum.

Software bots are selecting scientific paper reviewers in China.

A new software bot can hack and take over wayward drones.

Software bots can predict the properties of porous materials.

Software bots used for psychiatry raise ethical questions.

Using software bots to study proteins.

Software bots vastly upscale Alzheimer's studies.

Software bots are being used in cyber defense.

Who is liable when a software bot loses a fortune?

Software bots meet Citizen Science.

Software bot translations helped Ebay boost sales by 10%.

A software bot may be "deciding" who gets suicide prevention...yikes.

Software bots can be used to customize training for people.

Software bots have found mutations in noncoding DNA apparently tied to autism.

Automata:

San Francisco has banned cashless stores like Amazon Go.

In the $2 trillion infrastructure bill in Congress, some are recommending investing in robots.

Amazon is using robots to replace workers in its warehouses.  They are not laying off workers, but replacing them through attrition.

Boeing is going to replace human inspectors with technology.

As factories are automated, the workers become coders.

The quest to develop sensors that can smell.

META:

Does universal basic income not work?

Tech companies are trying to shape the rules associated with "AI."

True AI may be rooted in the technologies of today.

Sensors inspired by spiders might help drones, self driving vehicles and robots in the future.

Can Inspector Gadget help us resist the temptation of transhumanism.

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