Tag: robots

Bizarre humanoid robot with a face made out of living skin tissue is created by researchers in Japan

In sci-fi films like Alien, humanoid robots are so lifelike that it’s almost impossible to tell them from a real person.

Now, scientists in Japan are on their way to creating real-life versions of these realistic machines. 

The experts from the University of Tokyo have created a robotic face out of lab-grown human skin. 

Creepy video shows the bizarre pink creation attempting a cheesy smile.  

According to the scientists, robots with real skin not only have an ‘increasingly lifelike appearance’ but could heal themselves if damaged. 

The research has been led by Professor Shoji Takeuchi of the University of Tokyo and detailed in a new study in Cell Reports Physical Science.

Professor Takeuchi’s lab has already created mini robots that walk using biological muscle tissue, 3D printed lab-grown meat and engineered skin that can heal.

‘We managed to replicate human appearance to some extent by creating a face with the same surface material and structure as humans,’ said Professor Takeuchi.  

The ‘engineered skin tissue’ is made by taking a sample of human skin cells and growing them in the lab – similar to how cultured meat is developed. 

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LAPD expo shows latest in less-than-lethal police robots, devices

The Los Angeles Police Department hosted an expo on Thursday that demonstrated the future of non-lethal policing.

Some 70 vendors came to the police academy to demonstrate robots, advanced Tasers and other devices that can de-escalate dangerous situations without the use of deadly force.

The robots were available in two-legged humanoid versions as well as four-legged canine simulators.

“What this individual has the capability of doing is they have full range of motion,” said Michael Plaskin, whose company Alchera X develops police robots. “They can go ahead and communicate. They have the technology to raise their hands and walk around and be able to deter and detract from another individual.”

The LAPD and other law enforcement agencies were shopping around here seeing what’s available. The Police Commission has to approve major LAPD equipment purchases.

The LAPD is looking into less than lethal equipment to reduce the number of fatal officer-involved shootings

“We’re having more and more incidents with people suffering from mental illness,” said LAPD Capt. Christopher Zine. “Also people that are addicted to drugs and alcohol. So using effective less-lethal options gets us to effectively de-escalate the situation. And that’s our goal. We’ve been de-escalating for as long as I can remember. And we’re gonna continue to do so.”

One of the less lethal options on display was the latest in Taser guns. The Taser 10 carries up to 10 cartridges.

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So They’re Experimenting With Military Robots In Gaza Now

One of the most horrifying facts about this dystopia we live in is that large-scale military operations are routinely used as testing grounds for new war machinery, using human bodies as guinea pigs for experimentation in what amount to giant blood-soaked field laboratories — all to benefit the strategic objectives of empire managers and the profit margins of the military-industrial complex.

Haaretz has a new article out titled “Gaza Becomes Israel’s Testing Ground for Military Robots”, which reports that “In an effort to avoid harming soldiers and dogs, the IDF has been experimenting with the use of robots and remote-controlled dogs in the Gaza War.”

(Yeah because my gosh, can you imagine how terrible it would be if Israeli soldiers and dogs got harmed while carrying out a genocide?)

The article’s author Sagi Cohen reports that drone-mounted robot dogs and remotely controlled bulldozers are two of the new apocalyptic horrors currently being battle-tested in Gaza, saying “defense establishment officials confirm that there has been a leap in the use and sophistication of robots on the battlefield.” Which is a pretty disconcerting sentence to read.

This news comes out at the same time as a new Public Citizen report warning of the likely imminent arrival of autonomous weapons systems which will kill people with minimal instruction from human pilots, saying “The most serious worry involving autonomous weapons is that they inherently dehumanize the people targeted and make it easier to tolerate widespread killing, including in violation of international human rights law.” 

The more normalized robots become within the world’s militaries the closer we come to this point, and steps are already being taken in that direction. As Common Dreams’ Thor Benson notes in an article about the Public Citizen report, “Israel has purchased and at times deployed self-piloting, lethal drones.”

Back in January I wrote that “Gaza is a live laboratory for the military industrial complex,” saying “Data is with absolute certainty being collected on all the newer weapons being field-tested on human bodies in Gaza (just like has been happening in Ukraine) to be used to benefit the war machine and arms industry.”

What sparked this comment at the time was reports and first-hand witness accounts we’d seen coming out about the prolific use of IDF “sniper drones” in Gaza since October, with Israeli forces frequently shooting Palestinians with quad drones armed with rifles. Copious records are most assuredly being compiled on the effectiveness of these newer weapons and tactics in ending human lives, which will then be used to help market those weapons to other states and to improve their efficiency in killing.

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Colon cancer patient died after surgical robot burned hole in organs: lawsuit

A grieving widower is suing a medical manufacturer, claiming that its device burned a hole in his wife’s organs during a procedure to treat her colon cancer, eventually leading to her death.

Harvey Sultzer, husband of the late Sandra Sultzer, filed a lawsuit on Feb. 6 against Intuitive Surgical (IS) claiming his wife suffered health complications following a procedure completed by their surgical robot.

Sandra underwent an operation at Baptist Health Boca Raton Regional Hospital in September 2021 to treat her colon cancer using the da Vinci robot, a multi-armed, remote-controlled device, according to the lawsuit.

The device is advertised “to enable precision beyond the limits of the human hand,” being “designed to provide surgeons with natural dexterity while operating through small incisions,” allowing for minimally invasive procedures.

The lawsuit claims that the device burned a hole in her small intestine, which required Sandra to undergo additional medical interventions.

After the procedures, Sandra continued to suffer abdominal pain and had a fever until she died in February 2022 as “a direct and proximate result of the injuries she suffered,” the lawsuit claims.

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SCI-FI NIGHTMARE? THESE INSECT-INSPIRED MICRO-ROBOTS ARE THE SMALLEST, LIGHTEST, AND FASTEST EVER BUILT

Engineers from Washington State University (WSU) have created the smallest, lightest, and fastest micro-robots ever.

Inspired by actual mini-bugs and water striders, the insect-like micro-robots could one day be used for artificial pollination, search and rescue missions, remote environmental monitoring, micro-fabrication, or even robotic-assisted surgery.

SHAPE MEMORY ALLOY POWERS MOTION OF MICRO-ROBOTS

The waster strider-inspired micro-robot weighs only 55 milligrams, while the mini-bug-inspired robot clocks in at a paltry eight milligrams. Perhaps equally impressive, both can move at about six millimeters a second.

A typical ant weighs about 5 milligrams and can move at nearly a meter per second. While extremely slow compared to real-life insects, this is significantly faster than other micro-robots based on the same technology.

“That is fast compared to other micro-robots at this scale, although it still lags behind their biological relatives,” said Conor Trygstad, a PhD student in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and lead author of the published work. An avid fly fisherman, Trygstad points out that real water striders move using an efficient rowing motion, while his micro-robot strider is currently limited to a less efficient flat flapping motion.

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Fears Pentagon was ‘building killer robots in the basement’ sparked stricter AI rules, DoD official claims

Fears the Pentagon has been ‘building killer robots in the basement’ may have led to stricter AI rules that mandated all systems must be approved before deployment.

The Department of Defense (DoD) recently updated its AI rules among ‘a lot of confusion about’ how it plans to use self-decision-making machines on the battlefield, according to the deputy assistant defense secretary.

Michael Horowitz explained at an event this month that the ‘directive does not prohibit the development of any systems,’ but will ‘make clear what is and isn’t allowed’ and uphold a ‘commitment to responsible behavior,’ as it develops lethal autonomous systems.

While the Pentagon believes the changes should ease the public’s minds, some have said they are not ‘convinced’ by the efforts.

News of the update to the Pentagon’s 2012 ‘Autonomy in Weapon Systems,’ has sparked a debate online with many people saying ‘If the Pentagon says they’re not doing it, they’re doing it.’

Dailymail.com has reached out to the DoD for comment. 

The DoD has been aggressively pushing to modernize its arsenal with autonomous drones, tanks, and other weapons that select and attack a target without human intervention.

Mark Brakel, director of the advocacy organization Future of Life Institute (FLI), told DailyMail.com: ‘These weapons carry a massive risk of unintended escalation.’

He explained that AI-powered weapons could misinterpret something, like a ray of sunlight, and perceive it as a threat, thus attacking foreign powers without cause.

Brakel said the result could be devastating because ‘without meaningful human control, AI-powered weapons are like the Norwegian rocket incident [a near nuclear armageddon] on steroids and they could increase the risk of accidents in hotspots such as the Taiwan Strait.’

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A Google DeepMind AI Just Discovered 380,000 New Materials. This Robot Is Cooking Them Up.

A robot chemist just teamed up with an AI brain to create a trove of new materials.

Two collaborative studies from Google DeepMind and the University of California, Berkeley, describe a system that predicts the properties of new materials—including those potentially useful in batteries and solar cells—and produces them with a robotic arm.

We take everyday materials for granted: plastic cups for a holiday feast, components in our smartphones, or synthetic fibers in jackets that keep us warm when chilly winds strike.

Scientists have painstakingly discovered roughly 20,000 different types of materials that let us build anything from computer chips to puffy coats and airplane wings. Tens of thousands more potentially useful materials are in the works. Yet we’ve only scratched the surface.

The Berkeley team developed a chef-like robot that mixes and heats ingredients, automatically transforming recipes into materials. As a “taste test,” the system, dubbed the A-Lab, analyzes the chemical properties of each final product to see if it hits the mark.

Meanwhile, DeepMind’s AI dreamed up myriad recipes for the A-Lab chef to cook. It’s a hefty list. Using a popular machine learning strategy, the AI found two million chemical structures and 380,000 new stable materials—many counter to human intuition. The work is an “order-of-magnitude” expansion on the materials that we currently know, the authors wrote.

Using DeepMind’s cookbook, A-Lab ran for 17 days and synthesized 41 out of 58 target chemicals—a win that would’ve taken months, if not years, of traditional experiments.

Together, the collaboration could launch a new era of materials science. “It’s very impressive,” said Dr. Andrew Rosen at Princeton University, who was not involved in the work.

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The first humanoid robot factory is about to open

A factory planning to pump out 10,000 two-legged robots a year is taking shape in Salem, Oregon — the better to help Amazon and other giant companies with dangerous hauling, lifting and moving.

Why it matters: Agility Robotics says that its RoboFab manufacturing facility will be the first to mass-produce humanoid robots, which could be nimbler and more versatile than their existing industrial counterparts.

  • China seems to think so: Beijing recently announced a goal of mass-producing humanoid robots by 2025.

Driving the news: Agility Robotics, which makes a bot named Digit that’s being tested by Amazon, plans to open RoboFab early next year, inaugurating what CEO Damion Shelton calls “the world’s first purpose-built humanoid robot factory.”

  • “We’ve placed a very high priority on just getting robots out there as fast as possible,” Shelton, who’s also a co-founder, tells Axios.
  • “Our big plan is that we want to get to general-purpose humanoids as soon as we can.”
  • There’s a growing backlog of orders for Digit, which the company says is the first commercially available human-shaped robot designed for warehouse work.

Where it stands: Agility has produced about 100 robots since its founding in 2016, and plans to move Digit production from its Tangent, Oregon headquarters to the more spacious 70,000-square-foot RoboFab facility in the coming months.

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China Unveils Plan To Mass Produce Human-like Robots, Calling It ‘New Engine’ For Growth

China is setting out to mass produce human-like robots in two years, an ambitious plan that, according to a blueprint issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), it hopes will make the regime in Beijing the leader in the field of robotics.

The goal is to establish an innovation framework for humanoid robots and ensure that the country can make core parts of the robots on its own.

The products, under the MIIT plan, will meet advanced international standards in quality, for use in harsh environments, manufacturing, and service sectors, according to the directive. Like smartphones, computers, and new energy vehicles, humanoid robots have the “disruptive” potential to “revolutionize” people’s lives, the document said.

The ministry told local officials to take advantage of China’s market size and its “whole-of-nation system” to accelerate humanoid robot development as a pillar industry to advance China’s manufacturing and digital dominance.

Beijing hopes that by 2025 it will have two to three companies with global influence and will nurture more smaller businesses dedicated to the field. In another two years, the aim is to create a “safe and reliable supply chain” for the technology and make the country competitive globally. At that point, it said, such products will be deeply integrated into the economy and become a “new engine” for economic growth.

The “brain,” “cerebellum,” and “limbs” of the robots should be the focus, and the industry should aim at creating “highly reliable” robots for harsh or dangerous conditions, the guideline said. When monitoring and safeguarding “strategic locations,” robots need to be able to move in “highly complicated terrains,” size up the situation, and make intelligent decisions, it said, adding that robots will need greater ability to protect themselves and work with higher precision in scenarios such as rescue work or where explosives are involved.

Relevant authorities need to deepen international cooperation, encourage foreign companies to create research centers in China, and bring Chinese products to the international market, according to the document.

Eager to partake in setting the global standard for emerging technology, Beijing said it’d like to get “deeply involved in the international rules and standard setting” and “contribute Chinese wisdom” to the industry’s development, the document said.

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Man crushed to death by industrial robot that confused him for a box: police

A man in South Korea was crushed to death by a robot that may have mistaken him for a box, according to reports. 

The victim, a worker in his 40s, was inspecting the robot’s sensor at a vegetable-packaging plant on Tuesday when the incident took place. The warehouse is located in South Gyeongsand province, a region in the south of the country.

The robotic arm is understood to have confused the man for a box of vegetables and grabbed him. It then pushed his body against a conveyor belt before crushing his face and chest, according to Yonhap, a South Korean news agency.

The victim was rushed to a hospital but died later of head and chest injuries, police said. 

The man was not identified, but police said he was an employee of a company that installs industrial robots. He had been sent to the plant to examine whether the machine was working properly.

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