The robot Digit stands approximately five feet, four inches high, with a metallic torso the teal color of a hospital worker’s scrubs. It can walk up and down staircases and around corners on two legs, and lift, carry, and stack boxes up to 40 pounds with arms whose hinges evoke the broad shoulders of a swimmer.
Agility Robotics, Digit’s manufacturer, shipped roughly 30 of these robots earlier this year to industrial and academic clients.
… It did not anticipate a swift early consensus that the robot gave people the creeps. Read More
Tag Archives: Robotics
Nothing to be ashamed of: sex robots for older adults with disabilities
This paper spotlights ways in which sexual capacities relate to central human capabilities, such as the ability to generate a personally meaningful story of one’s life; be physically, mentally and emotionally healthy; experience bodily integrity; affiliate and bond with others; feel and express a range of human emotions; and choose a plan of life. It sets forth a dignity-based argument for affording older people access to sex robots as part of reasonable efforts to support their central human capabilities at a floor level. The argument develops stepwise: (1) first, I dispel ageism and negative stereotypes about later-life sexuality, showing their deep historical roots in medicine and science; (2) second, I set forth a positive argument, grounded in capability accounts of justice, for deploying sex robots for older people with disabilities; (3) finally, after responding to objections, I conclude that sex robots are a reasonable way to support later-life sexuality for persons with disabilities. While often depicted as a product for younger, able-bodied people, this paper is a bid for reimagining sex robots as a product for older, disabled people. Read More
Gait-based Emotion Learning
Digital Twin, Virtual Manufacturing, and the Coming Diamond Age
If you have ever had a book self-published through Amazon or similar fulfillment houses, chances are good that the physical book did not exist prior to the order being placed. Instead, that book existed as a PDF file, image files for cover art and author photograph, perhaps with some additional XML-based metadata indicating production instructions, trim, paper specifications, and so forth.
When the order was placed, it was sent to a printer that likely was the length of a bowling alley, where the PDF was converted into a negative and then laser printed onto the continuous paper stock. This was then cut to a precise size that varied minutely from page to page depending upon the binding type, before being collated and glued into the binding.
At the end of the process, a newly printed book dropped onto a rolling platform and from there to a box, where it was potentially wrapped and deposited automatically before the whole box was closed, labeled, and passed to a shipping gurney. Read More
Lidar used to cost $75,000—here’s how Apple brought it to the iPhone
How Apple made affordable lidar with no moving parts for the iPhone.
At Tuesday’s unveiling of the iPhone 12, Apple touted the capabilities of its new lidar sensor. Apple says lidar will enhance the iPhone’s camera by allowing more rapid focus, especially in low-light situations. And it may enable the creation of a new generation of sophisticated augmented reality apps. Read More
Phantom of the ADAS: Securing Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems from Split-Second Phantom Attacks
In this paper, we investigate “split-second phantom attacks,” a scientific gap that causes two commercial advanced driver-assistance systems (ADASs), Telsa Model X (HW 2.5 and HW 3) and Mobileye 630, to treat a depthless object that appears for a few milliseconds as a real obstacle/object. We discuss the challenge that split-second phantom attacks create for ADASs. We demonstrate how attackers can apply split-second phantom attacks remotely by embedding phantom road signs into an advertisement presented on a digital billboard which causes Tesla’s autopilot to suddenly stop the car in the middle of a road and Mobileye 630 to issue false notifications. We also demonstrate how attackers can use a projector in order to cause Tesla’s autopilot to apply the brakes in response to a phantom of a pedestrian that was projected on the road and Mobileye 630 to issue false notifications in response to a projected road sign. To counter this threat, we propose a countermeasure which can determine whether a detected object is a phantom or real using just the camera sensor. The countermeasure (GhostBusters) uses a “committee of experts” approach and combines the results obtained from four lightweight deep convolutional neural networks that assess the authenticity of an object based on the object’s light, context, surface, and depth. We demonstrate our countermeasure’s effectiveness (it obtains a TPR of 0.994 with an FPR of zero) and test its robustness to adversarial machine learning attacks. Read More
The Architectural Implications of Autonomous Driving: Constraints and Acceleration
Autonomous driving systems have attracted a significant amount of interest recently, and many industry leaders, such as Google, Uber, Tesla and Mobileye, have invested large amount of capital and engineering power on developing such systems. Building autonomous driving systems is particularly challenging due to stringent performance requirements in terms of both making the safe operational decisions and finishing processing at real-time. Despite the recent advancements in technology, such systems are still largely under experimentation and architecting end-to-end autonomous driving systems remains an open research question. To investigate this question, we first present and formalize the design constraints for building an autonomous driving system in terms of performance, predictability, storage, thermal and power. We then build an end-to-end autonomous driving system using state-of-the-art award-winning algorithms to understand the design trade-offs for building such systems. In our real-system characterization, we identify three computational bottlenecks, which conventional multi-core CPUs are incapable of processing under the identified design constraints. To meet these constraints, we accelerate these algorithms using three accelerator platforms including GPUs, FPGAs and ASICs, which can reduce the tail latency of the system by 169×, 10×, and 93×respectively.With accelerator-based designs, we are able to build an end-to-end autonomous driving system that meets all the design constraints, and explore the trade-offs among performance,power and the higher accuracy enabled by higher resolution cameras. Read More
#roboticsBot or Not
CAPTCHAs have evolved to reflect the untenable distinction between real and fake users
A smiling woman unloads a dishwasher. The image, now embedded in a tweet, has been sourced from a collection of stock photos including other smiling women stationed at the same dishwasher. Partitioned into a neat, four-by-four grid, the image is topped with a familiar blue header and an apparently innocuous directive: “Select all squares containing a dishwasher.” Eight have been selected, as indicated by a familiar blue checkmark, but they contain the smiling woman, not the appliance. Is this a sophisticated critique of technology’s role in the gendered division of labor, or is it merely the handiwork of a misogynistic troll? Read More
AI-driven robot Mayflower recreates historic voyage
6 Steps to Get the Best Out of Your RPA Implementation
Over the last couple of years, there has been a lot of hype around robotic process automation. This makes a lot of sense if you consider that in 2018 Gartner was already labeling it “the fastest growing segment of the global enterprise software market” (with a revenue growth of 63%).
Moreover, based on a Dave Vellante study conducted between April 2019 and 2020, RPA was the technology with the highest adoption rate, together with machine learning and artificial intelligence. Yet, RPA implementation has led to mixed results for companies across the world and across industries. Read More
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