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Tag: robots
7-Foot Robot at Dallas Love Field Airport Watches for Unmasked Travelers, Will Notify Law Enforcement of Potential Crimes
A 7-foot robot at Dallas Love Field Airport is watching for unmasked passengers and will notify law enforcement of potential crimes.
What could possibly go wrong?
The robot, dubbed “SCOT,” was installed last month to “determine if they are capable of efficiently supplementing current airport operations,” said Love Field spokeswoman Lauren Rounds, the Dallas Morning News.
SCOT can detect if a person is wearing a face mask and can detect behavior of passengers based on what they are wearing.
The robot can bark warnings at people and call the police.
‘Black Mirror-Like’ Robo-Dogs Patrol US Border, Searching For Illegals
President Biden’s southern border crisis isn’t going away anytime soon as Republicans stress the need to beef up border security amid a flood of illegals crossing into the US. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently adopted quadrupedal machines to patrol the border’s harsh landscape, extreme temperatures, and dangerous obstacles to search for illegals.
DHS’ research and development team, the Science & Technology Directorate (S&T), released a statement on Tuesday specifying the use of Ghost Robotics’ robot dog ‘Ghost Vision 60’ by the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on the southern border to test new surveillance methods. The robot dog’s appearance is eerily similar to the rover dogs in the popular dystopian Netflix series “Black Mirror.”
“The southern border can be an inhospitable place for man and beast, and that is exactly why a machine may excel there,” said S&T program manager, Brenda Long. “This S&T-led initiative focuses on Automated Ground Surveillance Vehicles, or what we call ‘AGSVs.’ Essentially, the AGSV program is all about…robot dogs.”
China Unveils ‘World’s Largest’ Quadruped Military Robot
China has introduced what it claims to be the world’s largest electrically-powered quadruped robot to assist the military on logistics and reconnaissance missions.
With a “yak-like appearance,” the four-legged robot can reportedly carry up to 352 pounds (160 kilograms) of payload and run at six miles (10 kilometers) per hour.
The platform’s structure is designed to withstand challenging off-grid military missions and conquer a wide variety of terrain, including cliffs, trenches, grasslands, fields, deserts, snow, and muddy roads.
Despite being reported as the heaviest and largest quadruped robot, the hi-tech unit can run, jump, turn, and walk diagonally.
According to state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV), the platform has 12 modules and state-of-the-art sensors, allowing it to collect tactical battlefield information and perform logistics.
Potential military uses include all-weather operations in high-risk combat zones, remote border areas, and complex environments that have proven too challenging for soldiers.
Humanity’s Final Arms Race: UN Fails To Agree On ‘Killer Robot’ Ban
Autonomous weapon systems—commonly known as killer robots—may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity’s final one.
The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons debated the question of banning autonomous weapons at its once-every-five-years review meeting in Geneva Dec. 13-17, 2021, but didn’t reach consensus on a ban. Established in 1983, the convention has been updated regularly to restrict some of the world’s cruelest conventional weapons, including land mines, booby traps and incendiary weapons.
Autonomous weapon systems are robots with lethal weapons that can operate independently, selecting and attacking targets without a human weighing in on those decisions. Militaries around the world are investing heavily in autonomous weapons research and development. The U.S. alone budgeted US$18 billion for autonomous weapons between 2016 and 2020.
Human-like robot’s reaction ‘freaks out’ creators
A machine touted as the world’s most advanced humanoid robot “freaked out” its creators after it reacted with visible irritation and grabbed the hand of a researcher who got into its “personal space.”
A newly posted video demonstration of the interaction shows the robot, called ‘Ameca’, tracking a moving finger before furrowing its brow and leaning back as the person’s hand comes nearer. After the researcher pokes its nose, the robot then grabs their hand and moves it away.
The impressively life-like robot, which is being developed by British firm Engineered Arts, has been billed as the “future face of robotics” and “the perfect humanoid robot platform for human-robot interaction.”
Team builds first living robots—that can reproduce
To persist, life must reproduce. Over billions of years, organisms have evolved many ways of replicating, from budding plants to sexual animals to invading viruses.
Now scientists at the University of Vermont, Tufts University, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction—and applied their discovery to create the first-ever, self-replicating living robots.
The same team that built the first living robots (“Xenobots,” assembled from frog cells—reported in 2020) has discovered that these computer-designed and hand-assembled organisms can swim out into their tiny dish, find single cells, gather hundreds of them together, and assemble “baby” Xenobots inside their Pac-Man-shaped “mouth”—that, a few days later, become new Xenobots that look and move just like themselves.
And then these new Xenobots can go out, find cells, and build copies of themselves. Again and again.
“With the right design—they will spontaneously self-replicate,” says Joshua Bongard, Ph.D., a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research.
Self-Driving Farm Robot Uses Lasers To Kill 100,000 Weeds An Hour, Saving Land And Farmers From Toxic Herbicides
The nutrient content of our vegetables is down 40% over the last two decades and our soil health is suffering due to increasingly harsh herbicide use, according to Carbon Robotics founder Paul Mikesell. And farmers are increasingly concerned about the long-term health impacts of continually spraying chemicals on their fields.
But not weeding will cost half your crop, killing profitability.
The solution?
A self-driving farm robot that kills 100,000 weeds an hour … by laser.
“We wanted [to] figure out if there’s a better way we could do this.” Mikesell told me on a recent episode of the TechFirst podcast. “What we discovered relatively early on is that through the use of high-powered energy systems — so, lasers, which is essentially a way of delivering targeted energy — we can kill these weeds. And we can do it with the use of our computer vision and deep learning expertise … which allows us to in real time identify what’s a weed, what’s a crop … and kill the weeds. Get rid of them.”
State using COVID robot dog to take temperatures of homeless
The Honolulu Police Department in Hawaii is using a $150,000 robot named “Spot” to take the temperatures of homeless people in its effort to combat COVID-19.
Lt. Joseph O’Neal, acting lieutenant of HPD’s community outreach unit, justified the cost, which was borne by pandemic relief funds. He argued a tool that “takes transmission out of the equation” is not “a waste” from a long-term perspective.
KHON-TV in Honolulu reported Spot, a product of Boston Dynamics, is capable of taking a person’s temperature from a distance of seven feet in a fraction of a second.
“It also has two-way communication and can deliver PPE (personal protective equipment), food and water to someone who does test positive for COVID,” the news anchor said.
US Army to Stage Largest Robot Tank Experiment Ever
The U.S. Army intends to test an entire company of unmanned combat vehicles in simulated battle next year, a wargame that leaders called unprecedented and a big step toward refining the hardware and software that will one day enable wheeled robots to take the battlefield.
Gen. Ross Coffman, the director of Army Futures Command’s Next Generation Combat Cross-Functional Team, told reporters at AUSA this week that the closest thing to the Army’s upcoming robot exercise at Fort Hood, Texas, was last year’s platoon-sized effort at Fort Carson, Colorado.
For that exercise, the Army turned some old M113 armored personnel carriers into robots. “You can imagine that if you can turn a 113, you can turn anything into a robot,” Coffman said. “We learned a ton. There were some clear winners in the technology base. There were some that weren’t as great.” Among the winners was the human-machine interface, he said.
“Now we’re moving it up to company level.” he said. “The lessons learned here, we can now then apply to a brigade and to a division and see how we want to fight with these things in the future. But I know of no country that has done above singular vehicle experiments. So, no antecedent.”
Hellbound and Down 
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