Tag Archives: Robotics
Meta’s V-JEPA 2 model teaches AI to understand its surroundings
Meta on Wednesday unveiled its new V-JEPA 2 AI model, a “world model” that is designed to help AI agents understand the world around them.
V-JEPA 2 is an extension of the V-JEPA model that Meta released last year, which was trained on over 1 million hours of video. This training data is supposed to help robots or other AI agents operate in the physical world, understanding and predicting how concepts like gravity will impact what happens next in a sequence.
These are the kinds of common sense connections that small children and animals make as their brains develop. — Read More
The Shape of Things to Come
Amazon ‘testing humanoid robots to deliver packages’: Amazon is reportedly developing software for humanoid robots that could perform the role of delivery workers and “spring out” of its vans.
… The Information reported that the robots could eventually take the jobs of delivery workers. It is developing the artificial intelligence software that would power the robots but will use hardware developed by other companies. — Read More
Walmart and Wing expand drone delivery to five more US cities: Wing, the on-demand drone delivery company owned by Alphabet, is spreading its commercial wings with help from Walmart.
The two companies announced Thursday plans to roll out drone delivery to more than 100 Walmart stores in five new cities: Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando, and Tampa. Walmart is also adding Wing drone deliveries to its existing market in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. — Read More
Stumbling and Overheating, Most Humanoid Robots Fail to Finish Half Marathon in Beijing
About 12,000 human athletes ran in a half marathon race in Beijing on Saturday, but most of the attention was on a group of other, more unconventional participants: 21 humanoid robots. The event’s organizers, which included several branches of Beijing’s municipal government, claim it’s the first time humans and bipedal robots have run in the same race, though they jogged on separate tracks. Six of the robots successfully finished the course, but they were unable to keep up with the speed of the humans.
The fastest robot, Tiangong Ultra, developed by Chinese robotics company UBTech in collaboration with the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, finished the race in two hours and 40 minutes after assistants changed its batteries three times and it fell down once. — Read More
Samsung’s cute Ballie robot arrives this summer with Google Gemini in tow
Samsung’s Ballie will go on sale in the US and South Korea this summer, the company announced today. What’s more, through a partnership with Google Cloud, the diminutive robot will ship with a Gemini AI model.
Samsung didn’t state the specific system that powers Ballie, but in combination with the company’s own proprietary language models, it says the robot has multimodal capabilities, meaning Ballie can process voice, audio and visual data from its sensors. According to Samsung, Ballie can also manage your smart home devices and even offer health and styling recommendations, if you’re inclined to seek that type of advice from a robot. — Read More
Accelerate Generalist Humanoid Robot Development with NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1
Humanoid robots are designed to adapt to human workspaces, tackling repetitive or demanding tasks. However, creating general-purpose humanoid robots for real-world tasks and unpredictable environments is challenging. Each of these tasks often requires a dedicated AI model. Training these models from scratch for every new task and environment is a laborious process due to the need for vast task-specific data, high computational cost, and limited generalization.
NVIDIA Isaac GR00T helps tackle these challenges and accelerates general-purpose humanoid robot development by providing you with open-source SimReady data, simulation frameworks such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab, synthetic data blueprints, and pretrained foundation models. — Read More
China to host world’s first human-robot marathon as robotics drives national goals
For the first time, dozens of humanoid robots are expected to join a half-marathon to be held in the capital’s Daxing district in April, according to local authorities.
This comes as China ramps up efforts to develop artificial intelligence and robotics, to gain an edge in the tech rivalry with the US as well as combat the challenges of an ageing society and a falling birth rate.
Some 12,000 humans will take part in the coming race – and running alongside them on the 21km (13-mile) route will be robots from more than 20 companies, according to the administrative body of Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, or E-Town.
Prizes will be offered for the top three runners. — Read More
It’s Surprisingly Easy to Jailbreak LLM-Driven Robots
AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and other applications powered by large language models (LLMs) have exploded in popularity, leading a number of companies to explore LLM-driven robots. However, a new study now reveals an automated way to hack into such machines with 100 percent success. By circumventing safety guardrails, researchers could manipulate self-driving systems into colliding with pedestrians and robot dogs into hunting for harmful places to detonate bombs.
Essentially, LLMs are supercharged versions of the autocomplete feature that smartphones use to predict the rest of a word that a person is typing. LLMs trained to analyze to text, images, and audio can make personalized travel recommendations, devise recipes from a picture of a refrigerator’s contents, and help generate websites.
The extraordinary ability of LLMs to process text has spurred a number of companies to use the AI systems to help control robots through voice commands, translating prompts from users into code the robots can run. For instance, Boston Dynamics’ robot dog Spot, now integrated with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, can act as a tour guide. Figure’s humanoid robots and Unitree’s Go2 robot dog are similarly equipped with ChatGPT.
However, a group of scientists has recently identified a host of security vulnerabilities for LLMs. So-called jailbreaking attacks discover ways to develop prompts that can bypass LLM safeguards and fool the AI systems into generating unwanted content, such as instructions for building bombs, recipes for synthesizing illegal drugs, and guides for defrauding charities. — Read More
Inside Google’s 7-Year Mission to Give AI a Robot Body
It was early January 2016, and I had just joined Google X, Alphabet’s secret innovation lab. My job: help figure out what to do with the employees and technology left over from nine robot companies that Google had acquired. People were confused. Andy “the father of Android” Rubin, who had previously been in charge, had suddenly left. Larry Page and Sergey Brin kept trying to offer guidance and direction during occasional flybys in their “spare time.” Astro Teller, the head of Google X, had agreed a few months earlier to bring all the robot people into the lab, affectionately referred to as the moonshot factory.
I signed up because Astro had convinced me that Google X—or simply X, as we would come to call it—would be different from other corporate innovation labs. The founders were committed to thinking exceptionally big, and they had the so-called “patient capital” to make things happen. After a career of starting and selling several tech companies, this felt right to me. X seemed like the kind of thing that Google ought to be doing. I knew from firsthand experience how hard it was to build a company that, in Steve Jobs’ famous words, could put a dent in the universe, and I believed that Google was the right place to make certain big bets. AI-powered robots, the ones that will live and work alongside us one day, was one such audacious bet.
Eight and a half years later—and 18 months after Google decided to discontinue its largest bet in robotics and AI—it seems as if a new robotics startup pops up every week. I am more convinced than ever that the robots need to come. Yet I have concerns that Silicon Valley, with its focus on “minimum viable products” and VCs’ general aversion to investing in hardware, will be patient enough to win the global race to give AI a robot body. And much of the money that is being invested is focusing on the wrong things. Here is why. — Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 