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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,141

The funding, awarded by the UK Government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’s Regulators’ Pioneer Fund, will be used to pioneer new ways of regulating the autonomous and smart shipping industries to help them deliver innovative new technologies to the traditional maritime sector.

The global autonomous shipping industry is predicted to grow into a $136 billion behemoth by 2030, with UK businesses already playing a key role. The funding will see the creation of the Maritime Autonomy Regulation Lab, where regulators from the MCA and DfT can work with academia and support industry to promote on-water testing and flagship projects and help the UK grow its presence in the global marketplace.

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Our smartphones are cold, passive devices that usually can’t move autonomously unless they’re falling onto our faces while we’re looking at them in bed. A research team in France is exploring ways to change that by giving our smartphones the ability to interact with us more (via New Scientist). MobiLimb is a robotic finger attachment that plugs in through a smartphone’s Micro USB port, moves using five servo motors, and is powered by an Arduino microcontroller. It can tap the user’s hand in response to phone notifications, be used as a joystick controller, or, with the addition of a little fuzzy sheath accessory, it can turn into a cat tail.

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AIST recently unveiled its HRP-5, the fifth iteration of a humanoid robot design at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots. The long-term vision for the robot is to assist, not replace, workers with certain repetitive tasks. HRP-4 weighed 39kg and stood 151 cm tall with a 0.5kg maximum payload (per hand), so most likely the newest version will at the least boast an increased payload and sensor technology.

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This is not the end of the world but the end of competition as we know it.

Click investigates the rise of the robot butler, looking at whether voice-controlled personal assistants live up to the hype and at the potential dangers of living in a world where all electronics are controlled by voice.

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General interest.

IBM researchers are developing a new computer architecture, better equipped to handle increased data loads from artificial intelligence. Their designs draw on concepts from the human brain and significantly outperform conventional computers in comparative studies. They report on their recent findings in the Journal of Applied Physics.

Today’s computers are built on the von Neumann architecture, developed in the 1940s. Von Neumann computing systems feature a central processer that executes logic and arithmetic, a memory unit, storage, and input and output devices. Unlike the stovepipe components in conventional computers, the authors propose that brain-inspired computers could have coexisting processing and memory units.

Abu Sebastian, an author on the paper, explained that executing certain in the computer’s memory would increase the system’s efficiency and save energy.

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