Tag: robots

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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Little Radar-Toting Robotic Gun Vehicle Aims To Protect Squads From Drones

Atrio of international defense contractors have teamed up to offer a new lower-tier counter-drone system that consists of a turreted infantry rifle with a computerized “smart sight,” a small radar array, and a six-wheeled uncrewed ground vehicle. The resulting combination could potentially be employed against other threats beyond drones and would also offer units on the ground valuable surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.

Smart Shooter, headquartered in Israel, collaborated with Leonardo DRS, the U.S.-based subsidiary of Italy’s Leonardo, and American firm HDT Global to develop this system, seen in the picture at the top of this story. It is set to make its public debut at the Association of the U.S. Army’s main annual conference that opens in Washington, D.C. next week.

The weapon component of the system comes from Smart Shooter. It consists of the company’s Smash Hopper remote-controlled turret armed with a standard infantry rifle equipped with a Smash 2000-series computerized optic.

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Chinese researchers create dancing microrobots using lasers

A team of researchers has come up with a method that utilizes femtosecond lasers to make micromachined joints, showcased by tiny “dancing” micro robots that look like humans.

Inspired by the flexible joints of humans, the scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), of the Chinese Academy of Science, led by Prof. Wu Dong, proposed a two-in-one multi-material laser writing strategy that creates the joints from temperature-sensitive hydrogels as well as metal nanoparticles. 

What are femtosecond lasers? 

Femtosecond lasers are pulsed lasers that use short, intermittent irradiation. They feature the shortest pulse width, just one quadrillionth of a second (10-15 sec). Unlike a continuous wave laser, the material that’s affected by the pulse is instantly removed. 

The technique of femtosecond laser two-photon polymerization, a “true three-dimensional fabrication technique with nanoscale precision,” as the press release from USTC  describes it, has been widely used recently to create a number of functional microstructures. 

Such microstructures have been showing promise for applications in micro-nano optics, micro sensors, microelectromechanical systems. The study specifically mentions soft grippers, artificial muscles, and wearable devices as possibilities. The challenge lies in “integrating multiple microjoints into soft robots at the micrometer scale to achieve multi-deformation modalities,” as the scientists write in their paper, published in Nature Communications. 

One possibility would be to equip terrestrial robots with multiple shape memory alloy joints that can “realize linear/curvilinear crawling, walking, turning, and jumping by laser-inducing,” as the study proposes. Another use would be to create flexible hands with multiple joints as an aid to disabled people. This would allow them to grip different kinds of objects.

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Injured person reportedly dies after Cruise cars block first responders

On Aug. 14, two stalled Cruise vehicles delayed an ambulance from leaving the scene of a crash in which a driver had hit a pedestrian with their car, according to reports from the San Francisco Fire Department. The pedestrian later died of their injuries, which first responders linked to the delay in getting them to the hospital. 

“The fact that Cruise autonomous vehicles continue to block ingress and egress to critical 911 calls is unacceptable,” one emergency responder wrote in a report. Cruise spokesperson Tiffany Testo countered that one of the cars cleared the scene and that traffic to the right of it remained unblocked. “The ambulance behind the AV had a clear path to pass the AV as other vehicles, including another ambulance, proceeded to do,” she wrote in a statement to SFGATE. 

According to several reports written by first responders, first obtained by Forbes, emergency personnel arrived at Seventh Street and Harrison in SoMa and began treating a “critically injured” pedestrian who had been struck by a car. The patient was quickly loaded into an ambulance, but the ambulance driver was unable to immediately leave the scene, according to two reports written by members of the ambulance team.

Two autonomous Cruise vehicles and an empty San Francisco police vehicle were blocking the only exits from the scene, according to one of the reports, forcing the ambulance to wait while first responders attempted to manually move the Cruise vehicles or locate an officer who could move the police car. 

Collectively, these interferences “contributed to a poor patient outcome, delaying the definitive care required in severe trauma cases,” according to one of the reports. The patient reportedly died of their injuries approximately 30 minutes after arriving at San Francisco General Hospital.

SFFD representatives did not immediately respond to SFGATE’s request for comment. 

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Russia heads back to the Moon with Luna 25

Russia’s space agency successfully launched a robotic spacecraft Thursday on a journey to the Moon, the country’s first lunar explorer since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 sample return mission in 1976.

The Luna 25 mission lifted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, located in Russia’s Far East, at 7:10 pm ET (23:10 UTC). Heading east, a Soyuz-2.1b rocket propelled Luna 25 through an overcast cloud deck and into the stratosphere, then shed its four first-stage boosters about two minutes into the flight. A core stage engine fired a few minutes longer, and the Soyuz rocket jettisoned its payload shroud.

A third-stage engine fired next, then gave way to a Fregat upper-stage to place Luna 25 in orbit around Earth. The Fregat engine fired a second time to send the nearly 4,000-pound (1.8-metric ton) lunar probe on a roughly five-day trip toward the Moon. Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, declared the launch a success less than 90 minutes after liftoff, shortly after the Luna 25 spacecraft separated from the Fregat upper stage.

This is historic for Russia’s space program. Russia hasn’t launched a lunar mission in nearly 50 years and hasn’t had a mission successfully fly to any other planetary body since 1988, despite several attempts. Thursday’s launch was a major moment for Luna 25, but its departure from Earth on a reliable and proven Soyuz rocket was not the riskiest part of the mission. That will come in a couple of weeks when Luna 25 begins its powered descent toward the lunar surface.

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