Israel is developing combat vehicles of the future that will use the latest in artificial intelligence technology to reduce collateral damage and enable formations of manned and unmanned vehicles working in concert.
The director of defense research and development at Israel’s Ministry of Defense revealed the Carmel program concept behind the multi-year initiative, showcasing new technologies at a base in northern Israel Aug. 4.
Carmel is a “revolutionary program,” said head of R&D, Brig. Gen. Yaniv Rotem, in an interview during a visit by Defense News. The goal is to reduce the number of soldiers inside armored vehicles from the usual four to two while enhancing mission performance, all in a closed cockpit or turret. The system uses the latest optics outside and screens inside to allow maneuverability and a 360-degree view. Read More
Tag Archives: Robotics
Vacation scammer speaks with a Jolly Roger bot named Ox-Gut McGee
AI And Chatbots Are Transforming The Customer Experience
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is dramatically changing business, and chatbots, fueled by AI, are becoming a viable customer service channel. The best ones deliver a customer experience (CX) in which customers cannot tell if they are communicating with a human or a computer. AI has come a long way in recognizing the content – and context – of customers’ requests and questions. Read More
Catalytic: ‘RPA is the gateway drug for AI’
The immediate benefit of RPA is that it can eliminate a lot of repetitive manual labor and free up humans for what they are better at. But there’s also a side effect. RPA helps enterprises create a standardize framework for capturing data about how they execute processes as well as data about how processes can get delayed or stalled.
“If you set up RPA the right way by instrumenting the process, it’s possible to gather data to use as the training set for machine learning,” said Ted Shelton, Chief Revenue Officer at Catalytic, in an interview at Transform 2019. “RPA is the gateway drug for AI.” Read More
Futurist Thomas Frey’s predictions featured at the World Economic Forum
Can a Robot Hear the Shape and Dimensions of a Room?
Knowing the geometry of a space is desirable for many applications, e.g. sound source localization, sound field reproduction or auralization. In circumstances where only acoustic signals can be obtained, estimating the geometry of a room is a challenging propostition. Existing methods have been proposed to reconstruct a room from the room impulse responses (RIRs). However, the sound source and microphones must be deployed in a feasible region of the room for it to work, which is impractical when the room is unknown. This work propose to employ a robot equipped with a sound source and four acoustic sensors, to follow a proposed path planning strategy to moves around the room to collect first image sources for room geometry estimation. The strategy can effectively drives the robot from a random initial location through the room so that the room geometry is guaranteed to be revelaed. Effectiveness of the proposed approach is extensively validated in a synthetic environment, where the results obtained are highly promising. Read More
Autonomous Navigation of MAVs in Unknown Cluttered Environments
This paper presents an autonomous navigation framework for reaching a goal in unknown 3D cluttered environments. The framework consists of three main components. First, a computationally efficient method for mapping the environment from the disparity measurements obtained from a depth sensor. Second, a stochastic method to generate a path to a given goal, taking into account field of view constraints on the space that is assumed to be safe for navigation. Third, a fast method for the online generation of motion plans, taking into account the robot’s dynamic constraints, model and environmental uncertainty and disturbances. To highlight the contribution with respect to the available literature, we provide a qualitative and quantitative comparison with state of the art methods for reaching a goal and for exploration in unknown environments, showing the superior performance of our approach. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we present experiments in multiple indoors and outdoors environments running the algorithm fully on board and in real-time, using a robotic platform based on the Intel Ready to Fly drone kit, which represents the implementation in the most frugal platform for navigation in unknown cluttered environments demonstrated to date. See video at https://youtu.be/Wq0e7vF6nZM. Read More
Meet Hemingway: The Artificial Intelligence Robot That Can Copy Your Handwriting
The everyday tasks that humans often take for granted, such as walking and handwriting, have, until recently, been challenging to program a robot to do.The Handwriting Company now has a robot that can create beautifully handwritten communication that mimics the style of an individual’s handwriting while a robot from Brown University can replicate handwriting from a variety of languages even though it was just trained on Japanese characters. Achieving this milestone of robotic capabilities was quite a feat for the researchers and roboticists behind the scenes and the machine learning algorithms that power the robots’ skills. Let’s review what’s currently possible today and what might be in store for the future with robots creating handwritten text. Read More
This Robot Artist Just Became the First to Stage a Solo Exhibition. What Does That Say About Creativity?
Standing in a wood-paneled room at the University of Oxford, surrounded by her artwork, Ai-Da looks out at her creations. “I want people to know that our times are powerful times,” she says slowly, pausing between sentences. Like many artists, she wants her work to promote discussion. And yet unlike other artists, Ai-Da tells us with a blank expression and glassy eyes that only blink occasionally, she does not have consciousness, thoughts and feelings. At least, not yet.
Ai-Da’s creators bill her as the world’s first robot artist, and she’s the latest AI innovation to blur the boundary between machine and artist; a vision of the future suddenly becoming part of our present. She has a robotic arm system and human-like features, is equipped with facial recognition technology and is powered with artificial intelligence. She is able to analyze an image in front of her, which feeds into an algorithm to dictate the movement of her arm, enabling her to produce sketches. Her goal is creativity. Read More
US Army trains StarCraft II AI; teaching drones to dodge thrown objects; and fighting climate change with machine learning
Drones that dodge, evade, and avoid objects – they’re closer than you think:
…Drones are an omni-use platform, and they’re about to get really smart…
The University of Maryland and the University of Zurich have taught drones how to dodge rapidly moving objects, taking a further step towards building semi-autonomous, adaptive small-scale aircraft. The research shows that drones equipped with a few basic sensors and some clever AI software can learn to dodge (and chase) a variety of objects. “To our knowledge, this is the first deep learning based solution to the problem of dynamic obstacle avoidance using event cameras on a quadrotor”, they write. Read More
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